Worse Than War » Daniel Goldhagenhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war
A documentary on the general phenomenon of genocide.Mon, 09 Feb 2015 21:57:11 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1Watch Worse Than Warhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/the-film/watch-worse-than-war/24/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/the-film/watch-worse-than-war/24/#commentsThu, 15 Apr 2010 15:54:08 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/?p=24The post Watch Worse Than War appeared first on Worse Than War.
]]>Premiering on PBS during National Holocaust Remembrance Week on April 14 at 9 p.m. (check local listings), WORSE THAN WAR documents Goldhagen’s travels, teachings, and interviews in nine countries around the world, bringing viewers on an unprecedented journey of insight and analysis.

Watch the full film below:

With his first book, the #1 international bestseller Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Vintage, 1997) Daniel Jonah Goldhagen – then a professor of political science at Harvard University– forced the world to re-think some of its most deeply-held beliefs about the Holocaust. Hitler’s Willing Executioners inspired an unprecedented worldwide discussion and debate about the role ordinary Germans played in the annihilation of Europe’s Jews.

A decade later – and more than half a century after the end of World War II – Goldhagen is convinced that the overall phenomenon of genocide is as poorly understood as the Holocaust had once been. How and why do genocides start? Why do the perpetrators kill? Why has intervention rarely occurred in a timely manner? These and other thought-provoking questions are explored in a new documentary film, WORSE THAN WAR.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is the author of #1 international bestseller Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Vintage, 1997), published in fifteen languages, which was named by Time one of the two best non-fiction books of 1996 and for which he won Germany’s prestigious triennial Democracy Prize in 1997. Hailed as “a monumental achievement” by the Sunday Times of London, and as “masterly…one of those rare new works that merit the appellation landmark” by the New York Times, Hitler’s Willing Executioners may have generated more international discussion than any book in our time. He is also the author of the prizewinning A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (Vintage, 2003), published in eight languages, and has published Briefe an Goldhagen (Letters to Goldhagen) (Siedler, 1997). The just published Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (PublicAffairs 2009), which is already being published in eight languages, has been instantly greeted with great acclaim.

Goldhagen’s essays and columns can be found in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, New York Sun, Forward, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Süddeutscher Zeitung, Die Welt,Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, El Pais, El Mundo, Ha’aretz, Gazeta Wyborcza and many other publications nationally and internationally. He has appeared on many national television and radio programs around the world, including The Today Show, The O’Reilly Factor, Charlie Rose, has been profiled on television, including on Dateline, and in magazines, including the New York Times Magazine and the New York Review of Books, and has been, together with the eponymous international debate, the “Goldhagen Debate,” the subject of dozens of books. Twice named to the Forward 50, Goldhagen lectures frequently nationally and internationally on diverse subjects about the Holocaust, the Catholic Church and Jews, Israel, antisemitism today, and Political Islam.

Goldhagen, born in 1959, received a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a professor in Harvard’s Government and Social Studies departments until he decided to devote himself full time to writing. He is an affiliate of Harvard’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and on the board of directors of Humanity in Action. For more information, please see goldhagen.com.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/the-film/about-daniel-jonah-goldhagen/18/feed/62Understanding Genocides: Transformative Politics, Transformative Resultshttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/transformative-politics-transformative-results/39/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/transformative-politics-transformative-results/39/#commentsTue, 13 Apr 2010 19:36:40 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/?p=39The post Understanding Genocides: Transformative Politics, Transformative Results appeared first on Worse Than War.
]]>From the book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Excerpted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2009. For more information, please visit

Eliminationist assaults are strategic political acts embedded in larger political contexts, practices, and goals. Perpetrators therefore do things to their victims that, strictly speaking, go beyond their immediate tasks of annihilating, expelling, or incarcerating them, and their acts have political, social, economic, and cultural consequences beyond the al­ready momentous facts that people lose their homes, families, and lives. What follows is a preparatory sketch about these themes that subse­quent chapters elaborate upon.

Politically, the perpetrators with their eliminationist programs re­move or at least severely weaken people who would contest their power. In Burundi, Tutsi slaughtered Hutu in a more targeted fashion, and in Rwanda, Hutu slaughtered Tutsi comprehensively, each to fore­stall a lessening of their power. Liisa Malkki quotes Burundian Hutu survivors describing the Tutsi’s systematic decapitation of the Hutu by slaughtering their elite:

They wanted to kill my clan because my clan was educated. The clans which were educated, cultivated, they were killed. In my clan there were school teachers, medical assistants, agronomists . . . some evangelists—not yet priests—and two who were in the army. . . . All have been exterminated. Among those [kin] who were educated, it is I alone who remain. . . . There are many persons who leave Burundi to-day because one kills every day. The pupils, the students . . . It is because these are intellectuals. . . . One killed many Hutu university people.

The government workers . . . They were arrested when they were in their offices working. The others also in their places—for example, an agronomist, when he was walking in the fields where he works, he was arrested. There were medical technicians, professors. . . . Or the artisans in the garage, or those who worked in printing houses or in the ateliers where furniture is made. They were killed there, on the spot.

Be you a student, this is a cause; be you a rich [person], that is a cause; be you a man who dares to say a valid word to the population, that is a cause. In short, it is a racial hate.39

The Indonesian government, with the army and nonmilitary anticom­munists, removed its opponents from contesting political power by an­nihilating the critical mass of a popular communist party, putting many other communists in camps, and forcing still others to convert to ei­ther Islam or Christianity. The Pakistanis targeted the Bengalis’ politi­cal, communal, and intellectual elite, most intensively when the Indians were about to defeat them, which is when they began during a three-day period to systematically slaughter the leadership of the soon-to-be rival country. In many Latin American countries, including Argentina and El Salvador, rightist tyrannies victimized people challenging power from the Left. In Chile the Right’s mass murdering and removal of the Left started with its overthrow of a democratically elected Marxist gov­ernment. In Germany the Nazis killed or incarcerated leading German communists and socialists to consolidate their power in 1933. And after conquering Poland, they slaughtered members of the Polish elite to re­duce resistance to the Germans’ occupation and transformative plans. Hans Frank, the German governor of Poland, in a planning meeting for the “extraordinary pacification” of Poland, reported that Hitler had told him that (these are Frank’s words) “what we have now identified as the leadership elements in Poland is what is to be liquidated.”40 The Germans’ assault on the Poles combined the qualities of a nineteenth-century imperial land grab with the purposeful murder of significant elements of the population and brutal suppression and exploitation of those left alive. Similarly in the Soviet Union, the Germans sought out and killed the communist elites. But the Germans did not kill Jews for reasons of power, because Germany’s Jews did not contest power and had nothing that the Germans wanted. This is also true of other countries’ Jews, who were no more dangerous to Germany than their countrymen. After consolidating their rule, the Soviets, the Chinese communists, and other communist regimes also faced no contestation of power, so it was not an actual factor in their mass eliminations. Re­moving political rivals or those who might foment resistance increases the perpetrators’ security and power and, once eliminationist assaults are decided upon and begun, the perpetrators facilitate their eliminationist and political projects’ further execution by initially killing the targeted people’s elites. Targeting elites was also part of the eliminationist pro­grams of the Turks, British in Kenya, Indonesians, Guatemalans, Serbs, Hutu, and many more.

Socially and economically, perpetrators expropriate targeted peoples sometimes of territory and always of homes, belongings, and social and economic positions (though individual perpetrators often do not per­sonally benefit). While the victims’ personal losses are almost always in­cidental to mass annihilations and eliminations’ larger political goals, their territorial losses have often been integral to them. This was the case for the Germans in South-West Africa, for the Belgians in Congo, for the Turks’ slaughter of the Armenians, for the Germans’ push into Eastern Europe, where they sought Lebensraum, imperial living space, for the Poles’ expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland after World War II, for the British in Kenya, for the Chinese eliminationist cam­paign in Tibet, for the Serbs’ onslaughts in Bosnia and Kosovo, and many others. But it was not the case for the Germans’ slaughter of the Jews, Sinti, and Roma, the communists’ decades-long slaughters in China proper, or the Khmer Rouge’s mass murders. Serbs killed and expelled their Bosnian Muslim neighbors not only to Serbify the terri­tory. Some also took the victims’ homes, belongings, and places in the social and economic order. While the Khmer Rouge removed their vic­tims from their homes and belongings, they, unlike the Serbs, had no designs upon such possessions.

Economically, the perpetrators can also exploit the victims’ labor— even if they do so irrationally and, according to ordinary standards, unproductively. They put victims to work for prior ideological and ex­pressive reasons, as the Germans did to the Jews or the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodians. They also do so as a practical and almost inciden­tal accoutrement to the fundamental eliminationist enterprise itself.

Eliminationist perpetrators alter their societies’ social composition and structure. Their societies’ faces are irrevocably changed, and the social structures are mangled and shuffled. The obvious losers are the victims. The winners, those assuming improved places in the social array, are variable. Sometimes the perpetrators themselves gain new positions—victims’ homes, valuables, and goods. But it is usually by­standers, or selected groups or individuals among them, who take over the victims’ social positions.

Culturally, the perpetrators spread their dominance by annihilating completely or partially (and then suppressing) competing forms and practices. Eliminationist assaults almost always substantially homoge­nize a country, not only politically and socially but also in this way. The perpetrators often destroy and expel people precisely because they bear despised or rival cultural ideas and practices. This is particularly evident when religion is the impetus for one leadership and group to slaughter or eliminate another. Religious leaders’ support of mass mur­derers and their eliminationist goals often shocks, though it should not. German Catholic and Protestant clergy supported, often tangibly, the Jews’ elimination from German society, and some even justified, pro­moted, or tacitly supported the mass annihilation itself. The Slovakian Catholic Church was itself deeply complicit in the mass murder of the country’s Jews, issuing an avowedly antisemitic pastoral letter to be read in every church explaining and justifying the Jews’ deportation (to Auschwitz). Catholic bishops and priests supported the Croats’ mur­derous onslaught against Jews and Orthodox Serbs during World War II. Orthodox leaders supported the Serbs’ eliminationist assaults against Muslims during the 1990s, even opening their churches to the perpetrators for planning and organizing local eliminationist cam­paigns. The Orthodox Bishop Vasilije of Tuzla-Zvornik in Bosnia, an area of intensive killings and other brutalities, was one of Arkan’s more impassioned supporters. Several Orthodox bishops from Croatia and Bosnia presided over Arkan’s wedding in 1994, two years after he ini­tiated the eliminationist assaults in Bosnia. During the fully mytholo­gized event, celebrating Arkan’s exploits symbolically, Arkan clothed himself as a Serbian hero and his bride was the Maiden of Kosovo, a Mary Magdalene figure.41 In Turkey, Japan, Indonesia, and elsewhere, Islamic, Buddhist, Christian, and other religious leaders have sup­ported, blessed, and sometimes participated in mass murder and elim­inations. In Rwanda, many Catholic clergy tangibly assisted the mass murderers, lending themselves and their authority to organizational meetings, delivering Tutsi to the executioners, ferreting out hiding parishioners, and even participating in the actual killings. A Tutsi woman, a Catholic elementary school teacher, recalls:

The priest, Nyandwe, came to my house. My husband [who is Hutu] was not there. Nyandwe asked my children, “Where is she?” They said that I was sick. He came into the house, entering even into my bedroom. He said, “come! I will hide you, because there is an at­tack.” . . . He said “I’ll take you to the CND [police].” He grabbed me by the arm and took me by force. He dragged me out into the street and we started to go by foot toward the church. But arriving on the path, I saw a huge crowd. There were many people, wearing ba­nana leaves, carrying machetes. I broke free from him and ran. I went to hide in the home of a friend. He wanted to turn me over to the crowd that was preparing to attack the church. It was he who pre­vented people from leaving the church.42

Whether or not the perpetrators understand cultural homogeniza­tion to be an important goal, their eliminationist onslaughts increase it substantially. During World War II the Soviets deported and dispersed different national groups Stalin deemed disloyal and thereby, in addi­tion to substantial human losses, destroyed the infrastructure—schools, newspapers, cultural institutions—necessary for maintaining a thriving ethnic culture. Sometimes an eliminationist onslaught is, or includes, a nonmurderous, transformative cultural (and social) initiative, such as when perpetrators compel victims to convert or renounce their religion, as the Khmer Rouge forced the Muslim Cham to do. The result is a transformed public cultural life, in which previously contested or plu­ral cultural ideas or practices, including historical understandings, dis­appear, initiating the reign of a far more homogenized and diminished field of culture that is more to the perpetrators’ liking.

The perpetrators know that destroying the victims’ cultural institu­tions, objects, and artifacts further undermines them. Serbs purposely shelled the major cultural institutions in Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, as they sought not only to eliminate Bosniaks from Bosnia but also to oblit­erate their communal and cultural existence’s foundation. They first destroyed the Oriental Institute, burning the largest collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts in southeastern Europe, then the National Museum, and finally the National Library, incinerating more than one million books, more than 100,000 manuscripts and rare books, and centuries of the country’s historical records. For the artist Aida MušanoviN, and certainly for other Sarajevans, seeing their principal cultural repository engulfed in flames and then having the smoke, ash, and wisps of burnt paper hovering over and raining down on their city, “was the most apocalyptic thing I’d ever seen.”43 Indonesians forced

2.5 million communists to adopt religion and thereby renounce god­less communist atheism. Communists routinely destroyed or appropri­ated for other uses churches, temples, and other buildings belonging to different religions. The Germans destroyed or burned more than 250 synagogues in Germany alone on Kristallnacht, the proto-genocidal as­sault of November 9, 1938, and they destroyed many more across Eu­rope, sometimes, as in Białystok’s main synagogue, using them as figurative and ironic funeral pyres to burn hundreds or thousands of Jews alive. Serbs, as a self-conscious attempt to eradicate all vestiges of and the foundations for Muslim life in the hoped-for greater Serbia, systematically destroyed mosques and entire Bosniak and Kosovar vil­lages, as the Germans before them had destroyed hundreds of Polish areas they wished to Germanify. Croats, in their own eliminationist as­sault on Serbs and Bosniaks, did the same to Orthodox churches and mosques. Perpetrators target not just the victim groups’ religious build­ings and symbols but also their religious leaders. Of the ten thousand Tibetans the Chinese slaughtered in suppressing a rebellion in the cap­ital of Lhasa in 1959, they killed eight hundred Buddhist monks. A novice monk recalls, “The Chinese began closing down monasteries and arresting the high lamas and abbots. Those abbots who had op­posed the Chinese were arrested, subjected to thamzing [a ‘struggle ses­sion’ that often included verbal condemnations and severe beatings] and sent to prison. Many died under torture, others committed sui­cide.” The Chinese used the rebellion as a pretext to stamp out Tibetan Buddhism, destroying most of the country’s monasteries by 1961, and killing, sending to labor camps, or compelling most of the monks to leave the few surviving monasteries.44 In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge methodically destroyed Buddhist temples and shrines, and slaughtered Buddhist monks, so that only seventy of 2,680 monks from eight monasteries were alive when the Khmer Rouge fell after only four years. Extrapolating to the rest of Cambodia, which the evidence sug­gests is warranted, fewer than two thousand of seventy thousand monks may have survived, a 97 percent extermination rate.45 The Ger­mans, having thought out and planned the Jews’ total eradication with an unparalleled purposefulness, precision, and thoroughness, set about to save Jewish books, artifacts, and photographs so that when there were no Jews or Jewishness on the planet, they would have evidence of the putative demonic race that walked the earth until the Germans had extirpated it.

The perpetrators do butcher the political, social, economic, and cul­tural spheres of their society or of other countries, yet their most im­mediate objects of transformation are the individual bodies and psyches of their victims—of those left alive and even often, before striking the lethal blow, those they kill. As in Franz Kafka’s penal colony, they seek to inscribe on their victims’ bodies and souls their own conceptions of them as degraded, worthless, or hated, to be used, maimed, discarded at the perpetrators’ pleasure. Some perpetrators kill their victims, doing little or nothing else to them, and when the perpetrators slaughter or expel their victims by the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands many victims perish without suffering any additional personal act of cruelty or degradation. Yet those eliminating their real or putative en­emies often seek to mark them before snuffing out their lives or ban­ishing them from the land. As one Tibetan explains, “We were forced to see our orderly Buddhist universe collapse into chaos, both in men­tal and physical terms. The Chinese Communists, full of revolutionary zeal and utterly without any human sentiment, deliberately set out to prove to us that what we pathetically believed in was nothing more than a mirage.”46 The perpetrators make their victims hear their ha­tred. They taunt and mock them. They torture them in myriad ways. They physically mark and maim them. A specific torture, understood by the perpetrators but rarely by interpreters to be torture, and which needs separate analysis (see Chapter 9), is rape. Perpetrators use their victims as playthings, forcing them to perform painful, self-denigrating, and, for the perpetrators, amusing acts. They laugh at their victims’ sufferings. They express their domination and vent their passions and aggression against them, all the while conveying the victims’ powerlessness. The murderers and torturers physically and symbolically transcribe the new power and the new social and moral relationships on the victims’ bod­ies and minds. Even though many, in some cases all, of the victims will perish, the perpetrators in varying degrees seek to express their power, have it understood, and thereby legitimize it to themselves as they an­nounce that no political rules, law, or morality apply to the victims save their victimizers’ matrix of suffering, degradation, and death.

Mass murders and eliminations ultimately are far-flung transforma­tive political campaigns that—even if not always so conceived—leave a more thoroughgoing mark on societies and set more profound processes of change in motion than virtually any other kind of politics or individual program. For many societies afflicted by such politics, eliminationist and exterminationist programs are the most profound of any political program that takes place within their extended time pe­riod, rivaling or exceeding even the effects of major economic growth. In many instances, these transformative effects are part of a visionary goal of creating a new society, but even when not linked to calls to transformative arms, they radically transform the societies, often be­yond recognition, albeit in a somewhat different manner, anyway.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/transformative-politics-transformative-results/39/feed/2Video: Goldhagen’s Presentation at the United Nationshttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/video/goldhagens-presentation-at-the-united-nations/79/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/video/goldhagens-presentation-at-the-united-nations/79/#commentsTue, 13 Apr 2010 15:00:55 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/?p=79The post Video: Goldhagen’s Presentation at the United Nations appeared first on Worse Than War.
]]>Goldhagen was invited by the Singapore Mission on November 19, 2009 to present his book Worse Than War to members of the United Nations and to show a short, five-minute clip of the film by the same name. Goldhagen discusses the need to reframe issues of genocide internationally and understand these conflicts as systems which can be prevented – systems that function under his concept of ‘eliminationism.’ Eliminationism occurs “when a government or group of people deal with populations they have conflict with or see as a danger that must be neutralized by seeking to eliminate them or to destroy their capacity to inflict putative harm. To do this, they employ any of the five principal forms of elimination: transformation, repression, expulsion, prevention of reproduction, or extermination.” Learn more about the concept of eliminationism in this excerpt from the book Worse Than War.

Watch Goldhagen’s presentation at the U.N. in this video filmed originally for the THIRTEEN Forum.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/video/goldhagens-presentation-at-the-united-nations/79/feed/0Understanding Genocides: Communal Worldshttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/communal-worlds/43/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/communal-worlds/43/#commentsTue, 13 Apr 2010 14:01:37 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/?p=43The post Understanding Genocides: Communal Worlds appeared first on Worse Than War.
]]>From the book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Excerpted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2009. For more information, please visit

Although significant, dissenters, both individuals and small groups, re­ceive disproportionate attention compared to an overwhelmingly im­portant but neglected theme: the perpetrators’ communities. In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, I wrote about the Holocaust’s perpetrators in a manner that restored their humanity. I treated them fully as human be­ings having views about their deeds and making decisions about how to act, not as abstractions wrested from their lives’ real social contexts but, as they actually were, embedded in their social relations. Such an approach was at the time absent, even stridently opposed. The German perpetrators of the Holocaust and of eliminationist and extermina­tionist assaults on Poles, Russians, Sinti, Roma, and other targeted peo­ples operated within broader communities. They undertook their deeds often over long periods, always with considerable time on their hands to reflect. They had social lives. Wives and girlfriends accompanied many of them (many of whom also became perpetrators). The perpe­trators went to church, played sports, even organized athletic competi­tions. They attended cultural events, went to movies, and had parties. They wrote revealing letters to loved ones and went home on furlough. Most of all they talked—while on duty, while off duty, while eating meals and driving places, among themselves and others, discussing the days’ events, their historic deeds, and more. Those many German per­petrators carrying out their brutal eliminationist tasks in Germany it­self, especially in the camps densely blanketing the country, often lived at home. After a day of mistreating and brutalizing, and even killing victims, they returned to their families, had dinner, played with their children. They spent time with friends, also went to church, and did all the social and communal things, including talking about work, that people do. What is true about the German perpetrators’ rich social and communal lives is also obviously true, a commonplace, about other mass eliminations’ perpetrators.

Yet if you pretend people killing, expelling, or brutalizing others are atomized individuals, are under authority’s hammer or intense social psychological pressure with no capacity to think, or are bureaucratic abstractions instead of real human beings; if you toss around mind-deadening phrases such as “banality of evil” or “obedience to author­ity” or “group pressure,” or treat mass murder as if an artificial social psychological environment, such as the Zimbardo Experiment of a tiny number of people (twenty-four) for a short time (six days) with no ex­perimental controls to speak of, so it was not really an “experiment” in a scientific or social scientific sense, is a guide to its perpetrators’ real­ity and existences as people with families, friends, and communal lives; or if you postulate these fictive and dehumanizing reductions of the perpetrators as a tautological account of their actions and, more broadly, as a way of conceiving and discussing them, then there is no reason, as we have seen, to investigate how they come to hold their views about the world and their victims (or even what those views are). There is also no reason to examine the perpetrators in their multiple communal contexts while committing their eliminationist acts or to ex­amine their social relations, ways of living, and activities. The hard­headed questions we ask to ascertain the perpetrators’ motives and their sources, and the bystanders’ attitudes and their sources, also pro­vide answers that can be built upon to explore the perpetrators’ rela­tionship to the bystanders helping to form the communal contexts of the perpetrators’ eliminationist actions and lives.

The analytically unfortunate fact is that we know little about elim­inationist perpetrators’ communal lives. Some perpetrators, in the So­viet gulag’s frozen reaches, were removed from conventional social life. Yet many other eliminationist perpetrators are like the Germans, going home to dinner and out with friends, partaking in cultural events, attending church, talking about their deeds with others and among themselves—comparing notes, swapping stories, and discussing their deeds’ historic significance—and carrying on with their lives. This was so for the Japanese in Asia, the British in Kenya, the Indonesians slaughtering communists, the communist Chinese, the Tutsi in Burundi, the Serbs in Bosnia, the Hutu in Rwanda, the Political Islamists in Sudan, and so many more, certainly of most perpetrators killing people within their own country. As do other Hutu executioners, Léopord Twagirayezu conveys the easy conversational and convivial nature of the perpetrators’ talk and social lives: “In the evening, we told about Tutsi who had been obstinate, those who had gotten themselves caught, those who had gotten away. Some of us had contests. Others made pre­dictions or bets to win an extra Primus [beer]. The bragging amused us—even if you lost, you put on a smile.”18

The evidence strongly suggests that perpetrators live in a milieu over­whelmingly supporting and affirming their treatment of the victims in the name of and for their people. As with eliminationist assaults’ many other aspects, if broad principled opposition or dissent had existed, then there would be abundant credible contemporaneous evidence about it. It does not. Nothing suggests that family and friends, or community members generally, saw or treated the perpetrators with disapproval, let alone the withering condemnation that would be directed at those considered among humanity’s worst criminals. Nothing suggests that family, friends, and community members treated the killing and other eliminationist acts as anything more distasteful than an unpleasant part of a necessary elim­inationist time and project. Nothing suggests that the perpetrators’ com­munity and social and recreational lives were normalcy’s salve to guilty consciences. And nothing suggests that their communities were saying to them: You are a good man despite what you do. Rather the communal verdict was: You are a good man because of what you do. Nothing sug­gests that during eliminationist onslaughts the perpetrators’ existences are psychically and social-relationally fragmented. Rather, they consisted of integrated selves, with integrated minds, in integrated communities with their self-conceived heroic, violent acts on behalf of their country, their people, their God, or humanity harmonizing with their communal exis­tences and with family, friends, and acquaintances. In Indonesia, through­out Bali, “whole villages, including children, took part in an island-wide witch-hunt for Communists, who were slashed and clubbed and chopped to death by communal consent.”19 In Bosnia, the ethnic Serbian commu­nity was so supportive of the eliminationist assault, and so deeply com­plicit and involved, that the extremely knowledgeable Alisa Muratčauš, president of the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors in Sarajevo, maintains that “a lot of people from Republika Srpska [Bosnian Serbs] were involved in the crimes, and I think that actually maybe 70 or 80 percent of Republika Srpska’s population should be actually punished in prison, in jail.” Adamant that she does not mean they merely “sup­ported” the crimes of raping, torturing, expelling, and killing people, de­stroying their houses, and more, she explains that they “actually committed crimes. People who returned to their original community meet very often their perpetrators, [who say] ‘Oh, hi, hello.’”20 In Rwanda, an in-depth study about one community of killers shows how the perpetra­tors slaughtered their victims with incredible cruelty and lived their lives with family, friends, and community in a thoroughly integrated and sym­biotic way. Jean Hatzfeld, its author, writes: “In 1994, between eleven in the morning on Monday April 11 and two in the afternoon on Saturday May 14, about fifty thousand Tutsi, out of a population of around fifty­ nine thousand, were massacred by machete, murdered every day of the week, from nine-thirty in the morning until four in the afternoon, by Hutu neighbors and militiamen, on the hills of the commune of Nyamata, in Rwanda.” This, he adds, “is the point of departure of this book.”21

Although we need more evidence to draw firmly grounded general con­clusions for certain eliminationist assaults, the substantial existing evidence suggests that, overwhelmingly, ordinary people, moved by their hatreds and prejudices, by their beliefs in victims’ evil or noxiousness, by their con­viction that they and others ought to eliminate the victims, support their countrymen, ethnic group members, or village or communal members’ killing, expelling, or brutalizing others—as Germans did during the Nazi period, as Poles of Jedwabne did, as the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe did regarding ethnic Germans, as British settlers in Kenya did, as Bosnian Serbs did, and as Hutu across Rwanda did. The killers, and those near them in their cities, towns, and villages, and especially those emo­tionally dear to them, constitute mutually supportive eliminationist com­munities. Alphonse Hitiyaremye, a Hutu mass murderer, conveys how the Nyamata commune’s ordinary Hutu had this unmistakably affirmed, starting with the killing’s first day, a machete butchering orgy of five thousand Tutsi holed up in the local church and then in the Sainte-Marthe Maternity Hospital:

The first evening, coming home from the massacre in the church, our welcome was very well put together by the organizers. We all met up back on the soccer field. Guns were shooting in the air, whistles and suchlike musical instruments were sounding.

The children pushed into the center all the cows rounded up dur­ing the day. Burgomaster [the mayor] Bernard offered the forty fattest ones to the interahamwe, to thank them, and the other cows to the people, to encourage them. We spent the evening slaughtering the cat­tle, singing, and chatting about the new days on the way. It was the most terrific celebration.22

The perpetrators of mass annihilation and elimination know they exist in supportive eliminationist milieus; they themselves witness the open communal expressions of support. The eliminationist campaign against the Jews was immensely popular among Germans not only during the pre-exterminationist phase of the 1930s, as everyone in Germany knew—the regime and ordinary Germans alike openly celebrated it with fanfare—but also during the mass-murderous phase starting in 1941.

To see how this knowledge of the Germans’ broad base of support for the Jews’ elimination was acted upon by the regime, shared by Ger­man bystanders, and communicated by the perpetrators to their loved ones, we need merely to look to Europe’s largest concentration of Jews, the Warsaw Ghetto camp in the heart of Poland’s capital. Did the Ger­man leadership try to hide half a million Jews’ inhuman conditions? Not at all. In the midst of the Germans’ all-out extermination of the Jews, the German Labor Front’s recreational organization for German workers, called Strength Through Joy, organized coach tours of the ghetto where the Germans were starving the Jews to death on fewer than four hundred calories a day.

The Polish government in exile reported in May 1942:

Every day large coaches come to the ghetto; they take soldiers through as if it was a zoo. It is the thing to do to provoke the wild an­imals. Often soldiers strike out at passers-by with long whips as they drive through. They go to the cemetery where they take pictures. They compel the families of the dead and the rabbis to interrupt the funeral and to pose in front of their lenses. They set up genre pic­tures (old Jew above the corpse of a young girl).

Pedestrians in the Warsaw Ghetto walk past corpses lying on the pavement on Rynkowa Street, near the ghetto wall, Warsaw, Poland, 1940-1941.

The brutality—whips!—the photographing, the mocking, the joyful­ness and obvious approval (already seen and further discussed below), these recurring features of eliminationist assaults were apparent (1) in the tourism itself (common among German bystanders where perpe­trators brutalized or slaughtered Jews), (2) in the acts of these coachloads of ordinary Germans, and, of course, (3) for all the perpe­trators in Warsaw and other places hosting such tourists to see. The regime, knowledgeable of Germans’ broad solidarity with their elimi­nationist project, also made films of the ghetto, showing them in Ger­many. Members of the German press, so that they, the eyes of the people, could be fully knowledgeable of what the regime was doing, toured ghettos. One, named Roßberg, wrote in a manner capturing Germans’ common knowledge of this eliminationist assault’s charac­ter, great support for it, and transmutation of ordinary emotional re­sponses into their opposite upon beholding Jews:

I had the opportunity to get to know the ghetto in Lublin and the one in Warsaw. The sights are so appalling and probably also so well-known to the editorial staffs that a description is presumably superfluous. If there are any people left who still somehow have sympathy with the Jews then they ought to be recommended to have a look at such a ghetto. Seeing this race en masse, which is de­caying, decomposing, and rotten to the core will banish any senti­mental humanitarianism.23

Germans seeing people in a state ordinarily evoking compassion and pity are expected, when the people are “this race,” to behold them as a physical embodiment of their true, hateful nature. We have no reason to believe they did otherwise. After the Germans had methodically de­ported to Treblinka’s gas chambers the Warsaw Ghetto’s inhabitants they had not already starved to death, the surviving Jews decided to go down fighting, rebelling in April 1943, until after a month the over­whelmingly militarily superior Germans crushed them. Many Germans celebrated the ghetto’s utter destruction. Air force sergeant Herbert Habermalz, wanting to make his comrades similarly joyful, wrote his former place of employment, a farm equipment manufacturer, a letter that, as letter writers knew, was likely to circulate among the workers: “We flew several circles above the city. And with great satisfaction we could recognize the complete extermination of the Jewish Ghetto. There our folks did really a fantastic job. There is no house which has not been totally destroyed.” That Habermalz wrote, without thinking he needed to explain to them anything about the “complete extermi­nation” of a Jewish ghetto once containing nearly half a million Jews, merely confirms what a vast array of sources definitively show: The Jews’ systematic annihilation was well known and well supported among Germans, so much so that Habermalz unabashedly termed the job done “fantastic.”24

To develop a systematic and comparative understanding of the per­petrators’ social existences and communal lives, and how their social embeddedness affects or reflects treatment of their victims, we need to examine the perpetrators’ various communities and social relations. We must replace the fictitious general image of the frightened, atomized, isolated killer (said to exist under a regime’s draconian authority, or under group pressure), with a realistic account of the perpetrators’ so­cial, psychological, and moral communal existences. These vary sub­stantially across eliminationist assaults, and even within given eliminationist assaults when a particular eliminationist program cov­ers large territories or long periods.

The framework for the needed extensive empirical inquiry into the perpetrators’ communal lives in individual eliminations and then com­paratively distinguishes five principal kinds of communities that form the social context for the perpetrators’ actions. First, the community of the perpetrators themselves, including but not restricted to men serv­ing in the same camp, mobile killing squad, death march, and other eliminationist institutions. Second, the broader nonperpetrator com­munities in which they are embedded while eliminating their victims. These consist of local cities and towns where the perpetrators are sta­tioned, whether at home or abroad, and the social communities and lives their governments and institutions at times create for them. Third, their home communities, to which most of them will return, of family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and fellow members of their local national, ethnic, or communal groups. Fourth, related to the third, the more abstract—though given the power of nationalism and ethnic or religious group membership to move people, hardly trivial—larger na­tional, ethnic, religious, or political communities. Fifth, far more distant and less relevant for most perpetrators, the international community, the rest of humanity.

The perpetrators live in all or most of these communities while they kill and eliminate their victims. Their physical and social existences are continuous in some, episodic in others, and nonexistent or almost so in others. But in them all, though obviously varying substantially, the perpetrators are situated socially, psychologically, or morally, and even in those they do not physically inhabit while acting as perpetra­tors, they know they eventually will have some relationship of moral accountability, psychological influence, or social or political conse­quence. This knowledge is relevant, can be powerful, and should not continue to be discounted. Still, whatever is generally true about the per­petrators’ various communities, including their general supportiveness, more can be said about each of them, and their interconnectedness.

Working in eliminationist institutions can be utterly normal (or at least can become utterly normal after a perpetrator’s initial participa­tion in an eliminationist operation) when the need to carry out the elim­inationist assault seems unquestionable. Even among perpetrators viewing the victims as sufficiently noxious or threatening to warrant or necessitate their elimination, including lethally, some may doubt such actions’ wisdom or morality. In such circumstances, a perpetra­tor’s comrades’ validation of the violence, or the knowledge that he op­erates under the state’s aegis, or as the nation’s or the perpetrators’ ethnic or religious group’s representative and guardian, can help quell a perpetrator’s lingering doubts. The eliminationist regime’s character, and the specific eliminationist institution’s character, can affect the per­petrators’ understanding of their deeds and their lives’ quality while killing, expelling, torturing, and immiserating their victims. Some regimes and killing institutions, such as the Germans’, were organized and hierarchical, and relatively lax and understanding toward the per­petrators. They were also characterized by considerable off-duty com­radeship and conviviality.

Some, also organized and hierarchical, are harsher, as the Guatemalan mobile killing squads could be. Others have more variable, fluid, and intermittent qualities, such as that of the far less formally organized and hierarchical Hutu. The Hutu’s killing operations’ character de­pended on whether the villagers were left on their own for a given day’s killing expeditions—villagers not feeling up to joining that day’s hunt staying behind—or they were under the supervision of the Intera­hamwe, which sometimes forbade a day off. But for the reasons already established and more addressed below, the various eliminationist insti­tutions’ other features—from their hierarchical structures, the actual or implied coercion that might exist, the normative world of support for killing and elimination—have not been the perpetrators’ prime movers, and could not have been given their actual conduct. Sometimes when killers speak frankly, they, in a jumble, adduce a host of factors and circumstances that composed the mass-murderous complex of their actions. But when doing so, there is an assumption, explicit or clearly implicit, of underlying consent to the deed, born of their shared con­ception of the targeted peoples as noxious or threatening, of deserving their fate. Some Rwandan perpetrators speak in such a logically inco­herent but psychologically plausible muddle. At one moment they dis­cuss how they got drunk on their greed for looting. At another moment they mention that the Interahamwe—dedicated executioners—would not permit them to take a day off or would reproach them for not killing an acquaintance, or would fine them for not going into the bush to kill (hardly a plausible burden as it was easily paid from their looting’s proceeds), or would threaten them with death for not killing. At yet another moment the same perpetrators openly state that they and their comrades and all Hutu hated the Tutsi, thought the Tutsi were not human beings but snakes, cockroaches, and vermin who wanted to enslave all Hutu, so they believed it imperative to free their country of the Tutsi scourge, so they “cut them.” Elie Ngarambe, in a work camp prison when I interviewed him, also speaks in such a vein, asserting among other things that he was coerced, as were other Hutu, but then, when trying to convey to me the character of the genocide and the various facets of what really happened, says and indicates in many ways that he and ordinary Hutu, perpetrators and bystanders alike, hated the Tutsi, thought them not to be human beings, wanted to destroy them, and pursued or supported these goals with amazing and cruel vigor. When asked, “Were most Hutu happy to get rid of the Tutsi in one way or another, even if they themselves didn’t want to do the killing?” he replies, “They felt like they should be eliminated and wiped out,” explaining that Hutu shared the government’s “bad ideology,” which told them to “start from a small child, continue with a pregnant woman, kill her with her husband, her in-laws, and all her families, eliminate them all, eat their things, after you finish everything take their land, take their cars. Think of how long they have been fighting against us.” Ngarambe is emphatic. “They [the Hutu] wanted to eliminate all of them [the Tutsi]. They did not want to see anyone surviving.” Ngarambe has confessed to participating in the killing of only two peo­ple, but similarly in the course of his own testimony (some quoted here) betrays himself, repeatedly making it clear that he was daily in the thick of the mass murder, participating in the butchery of many more.*25

The complex interactive effects of various influences upon some per­petrators, and yet their willingness and conviction in the rightness of the principle of eliminating the targeted people and of the killing itself that are the foundation of the perpetrators’ deeds and the members of their enormously supportive societies or groups’ views about what ought to be done, are captured also by others. Pancrace Hakizamungili discourses in a jumble about having no choice, having hesitations including those born of what will happen should they fail (which a “good organizer” can quell), and about his and the other Hutu’s hatred for the Tutsi, their en­thusiasm in going on the hunt, and their relief at finally ridding them­selves of the Tutsi. And so, from Pancrace’s mouth come words that could serve as a motto for our age’s willing executioners, whether ordi­nary Germans, ordinary Serbs, or ordinary Hutu, “you obey freely.”26

The local community: A group of German soldiers and civilians looks on as a Jewish man is forced to cut the beard of another in Tomaszow Mazowiecki, Poland, September–October 1939.

The second kind of community, the communities physically encom­passing or abutting the perpetrators while at their eliminationist tasks, forms the perpetrators’ immediate social context. These communities vary enormously. If the perpetrators are killing in their own country but not near home, they live as visitors or temporary residents. If in a con­quered or colonial area, their government or they and their compatriots construct a local perpetrator community (the nearby victim peoples usu­ally being communally irrelevant). These can vary from settler commu­nities, as the British had in Kenya, the Japanese founded in Korea, the Germans created in Poland, and the Chinese established in Tibet, to im­perial garrison communities with impromptu human and institutional infrastructural support, as the Japanese and the Germans had in some of their conquered areas. Everyone in such communities knows about the perpetrators’ deeds. They see them. They mingle with the perpetrators. They work with them. They often revel in the perpetrators’ deeds. They service and supply them, and collaborate with them in nonelimination­ist activities. Such people are not formally perpetrators (some do cross the line), yet they implicate themselves in the deeds, or they so intimately rub shoulders with the perpetrators that they belong to the perpetrator community. Everything suggests they are consensual communities.

The third community, consisting of the perpetrators’ families, neigh­borhoods, and towns, powerfully exists for all mass annihilations and eliminations’ perpetrators, though differently depending on where the perpetrators work their violence. Perpetrators, usually sooner than later, visit or return to their families and home communities, to loved ones, friends, and others, who often, probably usually, know at least the ba­sics of the perpetrators’ deeds. The perpetrators must inevitably con­sider how these people will judge their deeds. In many mass eliminations perpetrators operate in their home environs. As they brutalize, expel, and kill people, they, embedded in those communities day and night, do not have to wonder what their families and communities will someday say. This was true of those in Turkey attacking Armenian death marches as they trudged by impromptu perpetrators’ towns, of the enormous number of Germans guarding or servicing camps in their own cities, towns, and neighborhoods, of Indonesians slaughtering communists, of Serbs in Bosnia, Tutsi in Burundi, Hutu in Rwanda, and more.

Beyond their local communities is the larger reference group of the nation, the people, the political movement, the tribe, or the religious group, in whose name perpetrators act. Perpetrators kill, expel, and in­carcerate their victims to secure the future for themselves and their fam­ilies by reconstituting society. As we repeatedly see, they also understand themselves to be acting for their larger communities. What will be their personal legacies to their people? How do they expect their people to see and judge them, to thank and celebrate or to shun and punish them? Such considerations unquestioningly affect many perpe­trators, potentially all of them.

The national community: Austrian Nazis and local residents look on as Jews are forced on hands and knees to scrub pavement, Vienna, Austria, March-April 1938

Finally, there is the international community or humanity—the real human beings, not the abstraction of humanity moving many commu­nists, or the Germans’ and the Japanese’s restricted racist conceptions of humanity, consigning peoples to subhumanity. Perpetrators facing their victims likely do not think much about the international community. Yet, as much testimony indicates, the perpetrators are aware of a larger world, which they usually understand will condemn their actual and prospective eliminationist violence. In the past several decades, the spread of telecommunications has made perpetrators increasingly aware their acts will receive international scrutiny. Nevertheless, most perpe­trators appear but tenuously connected psychologically to these distant and rather abstract community considerations. After all, when perpe­trators face the “work of demons who wage their battle against us” or other putatively threatening or problematic subhumans, people across an ocean, or over a border or two, must seem irrelevant. Political lead­ers initiating and overseeing eliminationist assaults, however, are acutely conscious (if often ultimately dismissive) of the international commu­nity. The critical issue, taken up in Chapter 11, is how to vastly increase the international community’s psychological and moral centrality, and relative weight among the perpetrators’ various more immediate com­munities, for actual or prospective perpetrators—from the man on the ground, gun or machete in his hand, to his immediate commanders, to those running eliminationist institutions, and especially to the political leaders unleashing and orchestrating the eliminationist assaults.

Few, if any, perpetrators likely self-consciously disaggregate their embeddedness in various communities, or regularly assess how each community and its many members (even leaving aside the distant inter­national community) judge or will judge their deeds and ultimately them. For many, especially those working at home, no difference exists among some of their communities. For some, such as the Indonesians slaughtering communists and, even more so, Serbs in Bosnia and Hutu in Rwanda, the communities of killers, of immediate locale, of home, and even of the nation collapse into an integrated mass-murderous and eliminationist consensual community. In addition to these instances, the judgment of communities, except the international one, is obviously gen­erally a non-issue for killers, expellers, and guards. The perpetrators move in overlapping or intersecting communities approving their deeds, so acute moral doubt and existential discomfort do not arise.

In addition to the expressed approval and acceptance various rele­vant communities give them, the perpetrators know that those be­longing to their country, people, ethnic group, political movement, or religion, having been party to their society’s conversation about the dehumanized or demonized victims, widely share their views. The per­petrators know they similarly believe the perpetrators’ deeds are right and necessary, support them, are even thankful the perpetrators are eliminating the people they commonly hate or fear. Because the elimi­nationist logic of the perpetrators’ beliefs applies equally to the many others sharing those beliefs who have not been asked to act upon them, it is abundantly clear that many other people in the perpetra­tors’ communities and societies would also have brutalized, incarcer­ated, expelled, and killed the victim groups had they been asked or put in the position to do so. This, that the vast majority of ordinary Germans would have also been Hitler’s willing executioners, I demon­strated for Germans during the Nazi period.27 Though for other elim­inationist assaults the data do not lend themselves to the same methodologically inescapable, surefire generalization to the perpetra­tors’ societies and communities (exceptions notwithstanding), we can still say, for various reasons, that so many others from those commu­nities would have willingly acted as the perpetrators did. The perpe­trators know this very well. The perpetrators do not necessarily ponder how the members of their various communities work through the logic of their beliefs and what they therefore think about the perpetrators’ deeds, or what they would do if mobilized for the eliminationist as­sault. Neither do soldiers in war. Absent demonstrable opposition at home, soldiers do not wonder about their countrymen’s support or readiness to join them. They naturally assume both. So too the elimi­nationist perpetrators, conceiving of themselves, like soldiers, to be con­ducting a war against their people’s dangerous enemies. The public discourse—more intensified, explicit, and public immediately preceding and during eliminationist assaults—about the need to exterminate-the­brute or to eliminate-the-plague, merely confirms to the perpetrators what the same discourse had already prepared them and their commu­nities for. When governmental organs, civil leaders, media, intellectuals, and religious leaders repeatedly publicly proclaim—as they have so often done—people’s noxiousness and threat, and even call for their elimination, they further affirm what the perpetrators already know, having watched family, friends, and others nod in agreement or ap­provingly repeat what is in the air. “The Jews are our misfortune” was one of the German public sphere’s most oft-repeated phrases in the 1930s and 1940s. British colonial officials and ordinary settlers alike casually and reflexively spoke of the putatively savage, bloodthirsty, murderous Mau Mau. Ladino Guatemalans called Maya “animals.” Serbs as a matter of course referred to Bosnian Muslims as “Turks,” constructing them as the Serbs’ historic and eternal enemy, and as Bosnia’s rightless alien invaders. The Rwandan airwaves coursed with, and Hutu newspapers and popular publications printed, hate-filled ac­counts of the Tutsi “cockroaches” and calls to exterminate them. These and other commonplaces solidify the sense of a community of like-minded thought, values, hatreds, and actions among the perpetrators and those around them. As Pancrace, echoing so many others, ex­plained: “The radios were yammering at us since 1992 to kill all the Tutsi,” which found echoes in an activated and intensified Hutu con­versation, as Christine reports: “In the cabarets, men had begun talk­ing about massacres in 1992” with the president of their commune visiting their houses “to see that the tools behind sacks of beans were well sharpened.”28

A striking feature of prejudices and hatreds, of the dehumanizing and demonizing conceptions one group’s members have for another’s, is their intellectual and social leveling—within communities and, what­ever the specific beliefs’ differences, across societies and civilizations.

In given eliminationist communities, university professors and high school–educated janitors share common murderous views about tar­geted people. The same talk animates the lecture hall and the beer hall, the principal difference being the little separating highfalutin nonsense from plain nonsense. The “people of poets and thinkers,” as the Ger­mans, Europe’s most highly educated people, liked to call themselves, were no different from illiterate Hutu farmers (Rwanda’s adult liter­acy rate, at around 50 percent, was among the world’s lowest). Intel­lectuals, lawyers, teachers, doctors, and clergy—the opinion leaders and in some cases, especially the clergy, moral leaders—validate the elimi­nationist beliefs and acts of their societies’ ordinary members and prospectively further sustain the perpetrators’ confidence in their peo­ple’s solidarity. We have already explored how Serbian writers and in­tellectuals, including the country’s most influential body of thinkers, the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, laid down the common ideational foundation and even provided the political leadership for the Serbs’ eliminationist assaults. German intellectuals, doctors, jurists, teachers, clergy critically contributed to spreading eliminationist anti­semitism and other racist and dehumanizing views in Germany before and during the Nazi period. Shelves of books, including some of the very early scholarly works on Nazism and the Holocaust, bear such ti­tles as Hitler’s Professors, The Third Reich and Its Thinkers, The Nazi Doctors, Hitler’s Justice, Revolutionary Anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner.29 Such socially and culturally crucial people analo­gously prepared the ground for our time’s other mass slaughters and eliminations, including those done in the name of Marx and the prom­ised land he and his intellectual epigones promised. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and others, who laid the foundation for and initiated the communists’ long-term eliminationist assault on many portions of So­viet society, were extremely intelligent men and authors of learned Marxist works. Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge leaders were also rel­atively highly educated, having imbibed their foundational Marxism in Paris. In Rwanda, intellectuals prepared Hutu for what was to come, as Innocent Rwililiza, a Tutsi survivor, explains: “Genocide is not really a matter of poverty or lack of education. . . . In 1959 the Hutu relent­lessly robbed, killed, and drove away Tutsi, but they never for a single day imagined exterminating them. It is the intellectuals who emanci­pated them, by planting the idea of genocide in their heads and sweep­ing away their hesitations.”30 After the fact, some perpetrators, finally seeing their deeds through the outside world’s condemning eyes, reflect on how their intellectuals, elites, and clergy led them astray.

Intellectuals, doctors, teachers, lawyers, and clergy are also part of their societies. They too participate in the hateful discourses, in which they are no less, and often more, embedded than the communities’ other members who also create and sustain them. They too act or support the acts that follow on their logic. No significant part of the German elites thought the Jews wholly innocent and therefore dissented from the fundamentals of the eliminationist project against the Jews (though some would have preferred a nonlethal eliminationist solution). Even the leading German resistance groups to Hitler were profoundly anti­semitic, which informed their future plans for Jews. One of the resis­tance’s central documents, prepared by leading Protestant theologians and university professors, contained an appendix called “Proposals for a Solution to the Jewish Problem in Germany,” which, referring to Jews, stated that a post-Nazi Germany would be justified in taking steps “to ward off the calamitous influence of one race on the national community.” Yet thanks to the highly effective exterminationist pro­gram, they could perhaps tolerate Jews in Germany, because “the num­ber of Jews surviving and returning to Germany will not be so large that they could still be regarded as a danger to the German nation.”31 German elites were active, willing, and leading participants in the an­nihilationist assault on the Jews and in the Germans’ other elimina­tionist projects. Einsatzgruppen leaders slaughtering Jews in the Soviet Union were academically trained, as did the principal author and oth­ers working on the murderous and eliminationist anti-Slav General Plan for the East. Church leaders and clergy the world over, from Turkey, to Germany, to Croatia, to Indonesia, to Serbia, to Rwanda, and to the Political Islamic religious leaders and clerics in different countries, have actively and tacitly blessed mass murder. (Where, we should ask, have religious leaders opposed their countrymen’s or clansmen’s elimina­tionist assaults? If they had, such as the Bulgarian Orthodox Church leaders who were instrumental in preventing the Bulgarian Jews’ de­portation, or Pastor André Trocmé, who led an effort in Le Chambon­sur-Lignon in France that saved five thousand Jews, we would know and they would have prevented countless deaths. Yet we know of so few.) Local dignitaries often organized and led the Bosnian Serbs’ para­military or local killing institutions. In Rwanda, the local intellectuals were in the thick of the mass murder. Jean-Baptiste Munyankore, a Tutsi teacher and survivor, explains: “The principal and the inspector of schools in my district participated in the killings with nail-studded clubs. . . . A priest, the burgomaster, the subprefect, a doctor—they all killed with their own hands. . . . These well educated people were calm, and they rolled up their sleeves to get a good grip on their machetes.”32 Well-educated people, leading professionals of one society after the next, together with those looking up to them, have closed ranks in a community of murderous consent.

After eliminationist assaults, after the massive death toll and the vast suffering the perpetrators have inflicted become clear, in country after country, in town after town, the perpetrators return to their people, whose names they have blackened in the world’s eyes, but evidently not in their own. In every mass murder and elimination’s aftermath, the broader community in whose name the perpetrators acted has not socially or politically rejected, let alone punished, the perpetrators. (Punishment has occasionally been meted out by those defeating per­petrators or those replacing the perpetrating regime.) The perpetrators have not been turned into outcasts, not shunned, not treated in any way as a community would ordinarily treat murderers, let alone mass murderers in their midst. It did not happen in Turkey, in Germany, in Indonesia, in Serbia or among Serbs in Bosnia—who after the elimina­tionist assault continued to celebrate the Bosnian Serbian elimination­ist architects Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić as heroes—in Burundi, in Rwanda among the Hutu themselves. Communities wel­come the perpetrators back and, when necessary and feasible, have pas­sionately risen to defend them. The social and communal solidarity the perpetrators find in the posteliminationist era merely continues the sol­idarity they experienced while assaulting their victims.

We do not know the percentage of each community’s people who have supported the exterminationist and eliminationist politics perpe­trators practiced in their name. Everywhere—among Turks, among Serbs, among Hutu—there has been some communal dissent. Even in Germany, where the evidence of broad and deep popular support for the eliminationist assault against the Jews is overwhelming, some dis­sent existed. (The ready knowledge we have of it and, often by the dis­senters’ own admission, of their exceptional nature and isolation, further confirms Germans’ overwhelming support for the elimination.) Nevertheless, in our time’s lethal and non-lethal eliminationist assaults, we find among the broader relevant national or ethnic communities lit­tle credible evidence of widespread dissent from the eliminationist con­ceptions of the victims and the thinking underlying such politics, or of actual opposition to the eliminationist onslaughts themselves. But we have abundant evidence of active communal support and encourage­ment for the perpetrators, of the perpetrators’ comfort within their var­ious communities and among their countrymen, and of the perpetrators’ smooth reintegration into their accepting communities when the mass killings, expulsions, and incarcerations end

*Another example: “We peasants, we were using our traditional weapons. It is for that reason that when you were hacking you were supposed to cut [the Tutsi] into two pieces. There was times where you would hack him and not cut him into two pieces and you hurt him only and think that he was dead. . . . Let’s say that we are going in the squad that is going to kill and loot, we meet someone and we are almost five of us, one of us says, ‘Let’s see who is going to be the first to hack him.’ The one who hacks the first runs, and the second one also hacks and runs.”

24. Quoted in Alf Lüdtke, “The Appeal of Exterminating ‘Others’: German Workers and the Limits of Resistance,” in Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer, eds., Resistance Against the Third Reich, 1933–1990 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 73.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/communal-worlds/43/feed/2About The Filmhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/the-film/about-the-film/17/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/the-film/about-the-film/17/#commentsSat, 13 Mar 2010 22:35:17 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/?p=17The post About The Film appeared first on Worse Than War.
]]>With his first book, the #1 international bestseller Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Vintage, 1997) Daniel Jonah Goldhagen – then a professor of political science at Harvard University– forced the world to re-think some of its most deeply-held beliefs about the Holocaust. Hitler’s Willing Executioners inspired an unprecedented worldwide discussion and debate about the role ordinary Germans played in the annihilation of Europe’s Jews.

A decade later – and more than half a century after the end of World War II – Goldhagen is convinced that the overall phenomenon of genocide is as poorly understood as the Holocaust had once been. How and why do genocides start? Why do the perpetrators kill? Why has intervention rarely occurred in a timely manner? These and other thought-provoking questions are explored in a new documentary film, WORSE THAN WAR.

A co-production of WNET.ORG and JTN Productions and funded by ThePershing Square Foundation, The Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, and The Goren Family Foundation, WORSE THAN WAR, based on Goldhagen’s book of the same title, which has been hailed as “magisterial” by the New York Times, “convincing” and “wholly original” by Kirkus, “pathbreaking” by Die Presse, and “masterful” by the Daily Telegraph, is the first documentary to step back and focus on the general phenomenon of genocide – offering viewers profound insights into its dimensions, patterns and causes, and tragic role in politics and human affairs.

“By the most fundamental measure – the number of people killed –the perpetrators of mass murder since the beginning of the twentieth century have taken the lives of more people than have died in military conflict. So genocide is worse than war,” reiterates Goldhagen. “This is a little-known fact that should be a central focus of international politics, because once you know it, the world, international politics, and what we need to do all begin to look substantially different from how they are typically conceived.”

Premiering on PBS during National Holocaust Remembrance Week on April 14 at 9 p.m. (check local listings), WORSE THAN WAR documents Goldhagen’s travels, teachings, and interviews in nine countries around the world, bringing viewers on an unprecedented journey of insight and analysis. In a film that is highly cinematic and evocative throughout, he speaks with victims, perpetrators, witnesses, politicians, diplomats, historians, humanitarian aid workers, and journalists, all with the purpose of explaining and understanding the critical features of genocide and how to finally stop it.

In Rwanda, perpetrators of genocide speak candidly about their participation in mass murders, and Minister of Justice Tharcisse Karugarama discusses the perpetrators’ willingness, the world’s failure, and how we can prevent other countries from suffering the same fate. In Guatemala, Goldhagen explores the concept of “overkill” with the country’s leading forensic pathologist, and in an extraordinary interview, he confronts former President José Efraín Ríos Montt, the person in power during the genocide of Maya in the early 1980s. In Bosnia, he attends the annual commemoration of the massacre at Srebrenica, the worst mass-killing in Europe since World War II, and has a candid discussion with the nation’s president Haris Silajdžić about his efforts to convince U.S. and world leaders to intervene when it became apparent that “ethnic cleansing” was underway. And in Ukraine, Goldhagen returns with his father Erich (also a scholar of the Holocaust) to the town where Erich was nearly killed during the Holocaust.

Goldhagen also conducts probing and revealing interviews with Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State; Francis Deng, UN Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide; and Clint Williamson, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues.

Directed by the award-winning Mike DeWitt, the film not will only leave viewers changed, it should have a galvanizing effect on the public and, most importantly on, our political leaders.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/the-film/about-the-film/17/feed/59Understanding Genocides: How They Are Implementedhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/how-they-are-implemented/42/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/how-they-are-implemented/42/#commentsMon, 08 Mar 2010 23:22:44 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/?p=42The post Understanding Genocides: How They Are Implemented appeared first on Worse Than War.
]]>From the book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Excerpted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2009. For more information, please visit

Three months into the Germans’ systematic annihilation of Eu­rope’s Jews, one German perpetrator, Martin Mundschütz, though a true believer in the cause, found the gruesome killing too un­nerving. Like a meat eater unable to bear the gore of the slaughter­house, he had to get out. Referring to an earlier meeting, Mundschütz wrote his commander:

Colonel, you are under the assumption that I have succumbed to a spell of weakness which will pass again without injury. Weakness was not the cause of my regrettably unmanly behavior towards you on the occasion of our discussion, rather my nerves snapped. They snapped only as a result of the nervous breakdown of three weeks ago, as a result of which visions have haunted me day and night, driv­ing me to the verge of madness. I have partly overcome these visions, but I find that they had bereft me totally of all my energy and that I can no longer control my will. I am no longer able to contain my tears; I flee into doorways when I am in the street and I slip under covers when I am in my room.

After explaining that he had managed to conceal his condition from his comrades and prophesying that if his commander did not transfer him, his condition would become “so obvious that my name [will be] on everyone’s lips,” Mundschütz continued:

If you, Herr Colonel, however, have an understanding and a heart for one of your subordinates, who wants to sacrifice himself to the very last for the cause of Germany, but who does not want to present the spectacle of one who is said to have succumbed to cowardice, then please remove me from this environment. I will thankfully return when recovered, but please allow me to leave before I succumb to the same melancholia that afflicts my mother.

How did his commander, a colonel in the SS, respond to this man’s re­quest to stop killing? With venom? With violence? Or with solicitude? The colonel wrote his superiors:

I have spoken with Mundschütz myself and tried to straighten him out. As an answer I have received from him the enclosed letter. . . . According to it, it seems all in all that a hereditary disposition of Mundschütz has asserted itself. Mundschütz is no longer fit for ac­tion. I therefore have transferred him to the rear and request that all formalities necessary for his return be completed. According to the opinion of the unit’s doctor, a transfer to the SS sanatorium for the mentally ill in Munich appears necessary.

Mundschütz was transferred home and assumed other duties. An ardent Nazi, he passionately sought admittance to the SS, the institution that had brought him into the killing fields and now considered his member­ship application without prejudice, his refusal to kill notwithstanding.1

This spectacle of a whimpering, “cowardly” executioner, who ap­proves of the killing and who is treated with understanding by the sup­posedly most unforgiving SS, gives lie to many misconceptions about the German perpetrators and, as we will see, about the perpetrators of mass murder in general. The most egregious misconception is that per­petrators are incapable of reflecting on the desirability of mass slaugh­ter or their own participation in it. As this episode suggests, if we want to understand eliminationist perpetrators, then we must eschew the pre­vailing, thoughtless clichés about “human nature,” blind obedience to authority, bureaucratic mindsets, or irresistible social psychological pressure. Instead, we must investigate the killers, asking how and why they do what they do.

Both scholars and nonscholars have assumed that when a leader or­ders people to be eliminated, his followers do it reflexively, and that the unhuman, so-called machinery of destruction, like a machine, in­exorably begins to roll forward. This assumption, most prevalent in writings about the Holocaust, was so powerful that for the first sev­eral decades of the investigation of mass murder, the perpetrators and their own understanding of their actions were not topics of serious scholarly inquiry. Almost no research was done on the perpetrators and almost no actual knowledge about them existed. What substituted for knowledge was an array of false notions, some having achieved mytho­logical status, about the Holocaust’s perpetrators, the institutions of killing, and its essential features.

It was wrongly believed that the Holocaust’s perpetrators were all or principally SS men, that they were relatively small in number, that they had to kill, and that modern technology itself made the genocide pos­sible. (These notions still circulate in the popular media and unscholarly writing.) Something as basic as the number of perpetrators was there­fore unknown and not even raised as a question in the central works on the Holocaust. Dehumanizing and virtually racist clichés about so-called German national character informed many. Who the killers were, how they joined killing institutions, what life was like while killing, what they thought of their victims and their deeds, what choices they had, and what choices they made about treating their victims—these and other questions were left uninvestigated. On the rare occasions that such questions were asked, they were answered with empirically barren speculation presented as settled fact.

Until my book Hitler’s Willing Executioners directly took issue with this historical neglect, what was true about the Holocaust’s investiga­tion, which antedated the study of other mass murders by decades, has by and large been true about other mass murders. Thus, when Michael Kaufman, trying to make sense of the Serbs’ onslaught against Koso­vars in 1999, deemed it necessary to plumb the motives of the Serbian perpetrators, he wrote in the New York Times that the time had come to ask “the kinds of questions raised in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book.”2 Even today, untenable assumptions about why people follow orders to annihilate thousands or millions of people remain rife in the literature on mass murder. Little has been written on the institutions of mass slaughter and elimination. Few empirically grounded conclusions have been put forward about why mass murders, or eliminations, get implemented, and in the manner and with the means that they do.

This subject is explosive. Shifting attention away from monstrous, supposedly irresistible leaders, from abstractions such as a “terror ap­paratus,” and from faceless institutions such as the German SS (or Sad-dam’s Republican Guards, the Serbs’ Arkan’s Tigers, and others) forces people to confront the humanity of the perpetrators and their horrify­ing acts, and to ask difficult questions, deemed threatening by many, about the societies and cultures that bred such people. Confronting perpetrators—one man, then another, then another—also forces people to face the overwhelming, undoable necessity of bringing thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people to justice for committing murder. People on all sides would generally prefer (some are desperate) to sidestep this task, to get on with life, and so are content to blame leaders and a few unusually barbarous killers. It should therefore have come as no surprise that when Hitler’s Willing Executioners was published, an international explosion ensued that lasted years. In being a broad and unvarnished study of the Holocaust’s German perpetrators, the book made their humanity unavoidable. By forcing these themes before the public and answering these questions, it overturned misconceptions about the Holocaust, including about Germany’s political culture before and during the Nazi period. Reject­ing customary abstractions and the ahistorical and incoherent implica­tion of humanity itself in the mass murder (the “anyone would have done it” refrain), it focused on the actual human beings, principally though not exclusively Germans, who actually committed and sup­ported the mass murder and other eliminationist acts.

An in-depth study could be done on the German perpetrators, be­cause a wealth of information exists about them—from the vast testi­mony of survivors and of the perpetrators themselves, collected after the war by Germany’s legal authorities. Only a fraction of such infor­mation exists for other mass murderers. Generally, little is known about the killing institutions and their members. Hence, an analysis of why and how the perpetrators implemented most exterminationist and eliminationist programs relies on less voluminous and good in­formation (substantial knowledge about the defeated Hutu killers in Rwanda has been emerging). Overall conclusions must be provisional and tentative, until more complete information is uncovered about other mass eliminations (though it is unlikely to happen about most of them).

Mass murder and eliminations begin because, in seemingly opportune circumstances, leaders decide to address their “problems” with “final solutions” or near-final ones that usually employ a combination of eliminationist means. Yet leaders do not perpetrate the crime alone. So the analysis must venture beyond the leaders, their worldviews, and their decision-making circumstances, to a range of institutional, logis­tical, and human factors that map what must occur for the killing and eliminationist acts to proceed.

Mass elimination operations are often mammoth: the vast number of victims (hundreds of thousands, millions, even tens of millions) and of perpetrators (tens, hundreds of thousands, even millions); the opera­tions’ geographic size can be a country or a continent; the places to at­tack or comb through can run into the thousands; the coordination of the many institutions and perpetrators can be extensive and complex. It should come as no surprise, then, that substantial planning often pre­cedes the actual murderous and eliminationist onslaughts. It should also come as no surprise that, for two reasons, this strategic planning typically focuses on killing targeted peoples’ elites, the most dangerous portion of the people who are most likely to organize resistance.

The Turks carried out such detailed preparation and targeting of elites. For months they planned a coordinated lethal assault on Turkey’s Armenians, raised the units that would spearhead it, and drew up lists of the Armenian elites to be killed immediately. The Germans similarly had planning offices working out the programs for the elimination of the Jews in Germany and throughout Europe, and for eliminating Poles and others from territories that Germans wished to repopulate with Germans. Before the Germans began Soviet Jews’ systematic annihila­tion, they created and mobilized, among other units, the Einsatzgrup­pen mobile killing squads. Before the Germans began the assault on each country’s or territory’s Jews, they planned and coordinated the assault’s different aspects, and in many places, starting with Germany itself, the strategy included creating a pseudolegal foundation that itself composed one facet of the eliminationist program and provided a basis for the upcoming intensified attacks.

The Khmer Rouge, anything but the embodiment of modern forward thinking, nevertheless knew what they would do upon taking power. They immediately embarked on the most thoroughgoing and precipi­tous expulsion in human history—emptying Cambodian cities, towns, and villages in a few days. They also proceeded to murder Cambodia’s elites, slaughtering former government and military officials, doctors, lawyers, teachers, other professionals, anyone with evidence of an ad­vanced education. The Hutu leadership similarly conducted extensive planning for the eventual annihilation of the Tutsi. The preparation may have begun four years before implementation. It included raising and training units, drawing up lists of Tutsi elites to be killed, coordinating the assaults nationwide, and undertaking more than a dozen ex­ploratory killings. Major Brent Beardsley, the executive assistant to General Romeo Dallaire, the UN commander in Rwanda during the genocide, explains: “In the space of one day, [the perpetrators] ampu­tated the entire moderate leadership of Rwanda; by that night, they were all dead. They and their families were dead. A lot of the leadership within the Tutsi community was dead. They had targeted all that day, and they had succeeded. So this was extremely well planned, well or­ganized and well conducted. This was not something that was just spon­taneous.”3 In each case—and this is true of many others, including in the Soviet Union, China, Kenya, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sudan—the nature of eliminationist political leaders’ planning varies, depending on a host of differences among the countries, settings, and intentions behind each eliminationist assault. Yet there are some constants.

Political leaders must find people to carry out the eliminationist pro­gram. What are the identities, recruitment procedures, and motivations of the perpetrators? The leaders must organize these people within in­stitutions. What institutions are they? Do the leaders use existing ones or create new ones? How do the institutions function? The perpetrators must gain access to the victims. How do they choose and identify them? The perpetrators must then implement the program. What are its lo­gistics and what means do they use?

The annihilation cannot happen instantaneously (except with nuclear weapons, massive airpower or artillery targeting civilians, or fully fueled aircraft), so at what pace and for how long do the perpetrators kill and eliminate their targets? The perpetrators often have more extensive con­tact with the victims than merely the instant of execution, and they are often charged with other, nonlethal tasks. What else do they do to the victims? The victims themselves are not inert. When are they able to re­sist their would-be murderers, and with what consequences?

The answers to these questions vary. Sometimes the best that can be done is to describe the variations and to unearth certain patterns, while seeking to account for the similarities and differences among on­slaughts, and to assess how critical each of these subjects is for ex­plaining mass annihilations and eliminations more broadly. Ultimately, we wish to know why the perpetrators kill. Why do they brutally expel people from their homes, regions, and countries? Why do they subject their victims to many other forms of deprivation and suffering? Why do the perpetrators not say no?

The Perpetrators

A perpetrator is anyone who knowingly contributes in some tangible way to the deaths or elimination of others, or to injuring others as part of an annihilationist or an eliminationist program. This includes people killing at close range or by protracted means, such as starvation. It in­cludes people setting the stage for the lethal blow, by identifying vic­tims, rounding them up, moving them to the killing sites, or guarding them at any stage of the elimination process. It includes people more distant from the deed. Leaders creating the killing and elimination pro­grams, and those working closely with and in support of them, and lesser officials contributing to the fashioning or transmitting of elimi­nationist policies or orders, are perpetrators. People supplying mate­rial or logistical support to killing institutions are perpetrators. What exactly a person perpetrates, and for what exactly he should be legally and morally culpable, depends on what he does in aiding what kinds of eliminationist ends. If he orders or organizes or has a ministerial or command role in institutions that take part in the eliminationist pro­grams, then he is a perpetrator of the overall mass murder or elimina­tionist program. If he kills or facilitates the killing of many people, then he is a perpetrator of mass murder. If he helps to drive people from their home and country, then he is a perpetrator of eliminationist ex­pulsion. If he beats and tortures people but somehow manages to do nothing to contribute to people’s deaths, then he is a perpetrator of as­sault and torture. What the minimum is that a person must do to cross the legal and moral threshold into culpability can be debated. But for those participating in eliminationist onslaughts, the need to explain why each perpetrator acts, which includes how each one understands the victims and his own deeds, applies to the person rounding up the victims, and the one organizing killing logistics, as much as it does to the person mowing down the victims or hacking them to death.

A killing or eliminationist institution is one deployed for mass mur­der or elimination, and its members kill or eliminate, or tangibly hasten the deaths or elimination of others. Many different institutions have been used for these purposes, and their variety is examined below. In many instances they include central national institutions, including gov­ernments and ministries, and in certain instances, there may be so many as to include virtually entire bureaucracies, if these are deeply enmeshed in an annihilationist or eliminationist program, as in the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany, in communist China, and in Baathist Iraq.

The perpetrators of mass annihilation and elimination are not born as killers or brutes. They must be made, in two senses: by following some path that lands them in institutions of killing and elimination, and by making a transition from not imagining that they would slaugh­ter or systematically eliminate other human beings to a point where, for whatever reason, they are mentally and emotionally prepared to do so. Whether each journey is short or long, direct or tortuous, at some point each perpetrator makes theses dual transitions.

The perpetrators enter eliminationist institutions with different iden­tities and in different ways. Political leaders or subordinates charged with implementing the eliminationist assaults decide on some recruit­ment method based on their notions of which organizations and people are preferable for the task. Some perpetrators are drafted (or assigned); some volunteer. When drafted, they can be transferred from institutions identified with their country’s political regime, which might suggest a predisposition on their part to participate in an eliminationist project, or they can be chosen haphazardly, without consideration of whether they are especially suited for the enterprise. The Soviet leaders staffed the gulag with NKVD troops, the regime’s ideological guardians, peo­ple of demonstrated fidelity to the communist creed and the use of vi­olence to restructure Soviet society. The regimes in Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina, and Chile typically employed soldiers who were members of special elite units dedicated to rooting out the states’ real or designated enemies. The Turkish leadership employed a combination of special units of criminals, ordinary Turkish troops, and local people who took it upon themselves to torture and kill the Armenians trudg­ing on their death marches, and to plunder their goods. Allowing for such local participation of ordinary Turks produced more than enough volunteers who worked as de facto auxiliaries of the major killing in­stitutions. In Croatia during World War II, the Ustasha mass murderers of Serbs, Jews, and others were mainly volunteers. Similarly during the 1990s, the Serbian perpetrators in Bosnia and Kosovo, whether organ­ized in marauding paramilitary units or having descended impromptu locally upon their neighbors, were by and large volunteers for the un­abashedly murderous eliminationist enterprise. In Rwanda, Hutu in vast numbers, of all and no governmental or paramilitary institutional membership, butchered the Tutsi around them. Eliminationist perpe­trators are frequently not the special storm troopers with previously demonstrated fidelity to the mass murderous regime. They are the groups’ or societies’ ordinary members.

The Holocaust’s German perpetrators were an unusual amalgam. Those in the SS resembled the Soviet NKVD troops. They were the regime’s proud, ideological, and violent shock troops who, having ear­lier volunteered for the SS, were unsurprisingly sent to implement Nazism’s most apocalyptic designs. Others were volunteers, soldiers, or civilians joining in when the opportunity presented itself, as one Ger­man entertainment troupe, upon learning that the units they were pro­viding diversion for were going to kill Jews, begged to participate in the genocidal slaughter. Others volunteered to guard local camps in Germany or to join the Death’s Head Unit staffing the camp system. Still others became perpetrators when the regime drafted them—with­out any regard for their backgrounds, ideological affinity for the regime, or martial spirit—into reserve police units that were then em­ployed in the annihilationist program. The regime also used regular army soldiers to slaughter Jews and others, and policemen and other of­ficials to take part in killing operations against local Jews. The German leadership used the whole range of recruitment methods, drafting those who likely had a predisposition for the task, relying sometimes on vol­unteers, and choosing an enormous number of German men almost at random, expecting them to participate in the annihilation of millions. Most striking about the political leaders’ methods for staffing killing institutions and operations is their casualness. They believed that just about anyone was fit to become an executioner, and seemingly never considered finding willing Germans a problem. They were right. (The Germans also employed local auxiliaries of various nationalities, both organized and volunteer, whose members generally freely opted to help kill Jews.) Many more Germans and non-Germans not formally serving perpetrators in killing institutions lent their hands knowingly to the mass murder.

The number of people during our age who have participated in ex­terminationist and eliminationist assaults (let alone in associated abuses, violations, and crimes such as using victims as slaves or rob­bing them) is astronomical and unknown. It is hard to see how one could even come up with an estimate, given how little is known about the number of perpetrators involved in many eliminations, including some gargantuan ones. There may have been half a million Germans (Austrians at that time were members of the German Reich) involved in the Jews’ annihilation. Across Europe, thousands upon thousands of people of other nationalities participated in the same annihilation, es­pecially Poles, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians, who themselves killed many Jews during and sometimes, as in Poland and Ukraine, after the Holocaust. The French, Dutch, Slovaks, and others helped deport Jews to their deaths. Beyond this one aspect of the Germans’ various exter­minationist and eliminationist assaults on Europe’s peoples, the Ger­mans and their local auxiliaries staffed thousands of eliminationist institutions (twenty thousand camps alone). The Germans used more than 7.6 million slave laborers (many housed in the camps), all of whom had to be guarded and controlled by people using or threaten­ing violence. If we count all the Germans (and their helpers around Europe) who fueled this economy of violent domination by servicing and doing business with these facilities, or who helped serve as the overlords for Europe’s peoples against whom the Germans were con­ducting eliminationist campaigns, the perpetrator population becomes astonishing—probably many millions.

We know much less about the perpetrators of other annihilationist and eliminationist assaults. Yet even a quick survey suggests that an enormous number of people have lent themselves to such violence dur­ing our time. In Rwanda, Hutu all over the country and of virtually every institutional affiliation, background, and profession took a hand in slaughtering their neighbors. A study of Hutu perpetrators that em­ployed a restrictive definition of what actions qualify someone as a per­petrator concluded that between 175,000 and 210,000 Hutu participated in the murdering or serious injuring of the 800,000 Tutsi victims. This amounts to a stunning 14 percent to 17 percent of the ac­tive adult male Hutu population ages eighteen to fifty-four.4 But this already extraordinarily high figure is likely an enormous underestimate. The Rwandan justice system, in its traditional communal justice insti­tution Gacaca, has convicted approximately 900,000 people of partic­ipating in mass murder (often multiple people or large groups killed a single victim or a small group).5 More than seventeen thousand Serbs served in killing institutions in just one small part of the Serbs’ attacks, the mass murder and expulsion of Srebrenica’s Bosniaks. How many more Serbs perpetrated eliminationist violence during Yugoslavia’s breakup? More than thirty thousand Turks served in the special units (discussed below) set up to spearhead the exterminationist assault on the Armenians. How many more tens or hundreds of thousands were there in the army and police forces who, unbidden, participated in the annihilation and expulsion? How many Soviets, how many Chinese, how many North Koreans staffed their vast gulags and other elimina­tionist institutions and contributed to the deaths of the millions these regimes felled? How many Japanese soldiers and civilians gave them­selves to their country’s colossal mass murders around Asia? Add to these all the unknown thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of perpetrators from one eliminationist assault to the next, and the number of mass murderers and eliminationist warriors who have peopled our era is staggering.

Mass annihilations and eliminationist programs show that leaders are knowledgeable about which people are suited to carry out the assaults on the targeted groups. Whatever initiative perpetrators take to join killing institutions or the eliminationist enterprise—from volunteers, to those who had the jobs thrust upon them, to those who chose to be their regime’s shock troops—regimes have rarely used coercion to bring perpetrators to kill or commit eliminationist violence. Leaders know that coercion cannot be a principal or widespread means for getting people to make their apocalyptic visions real. After all, a political lead­ership cannot coerce everyone or nearly everyone because there must be sufficient people who give themselves freely to regimes, particularly those practicing eliminationist politics and mass annihilation, if the regimes are to survive. The surest way for a political leadership to de­stroy itself is to try to force an enormous number of armed people to commit deeds that they think evil, which is what those who disapprove of mass extermination, expulsions, or incarcerations of civilian men, women, and children consider them to be. It is safer and easier to equip willing people of like eliminationist mind, though leaders of course might compel some others to aid them.

Once political leaders decide upon mass elimination and identify the people to perpetrate it, they must turn eliminationist ideas into elimi­nationist projects. The designated executors must be activated, in two senses, to become perpetrators. Their minds and hearts must be ani­mated for killing and its attendant cruelties. They must also be placed in the position to kill.

The historical record—from the Germans in South-West Africa, to the Turks, Germans, Croats, and others during the Nazi period, the Japanese, the Chinese, the British in Kenya, the Indonesians, Khmer Rouge, Hutu and Tutsi, the former Yugoslavia’s various peoples, and to the Political Islamists in many movements and countries—provides every indication that perpetrators quickly comprehend an elimination­ist policy’s announcement. Even though the measures are radical, the perpetrators understand the policies’ rationale and necessity. The per­petrators do not wonder whether the measures are those of a madman, whether the world has gone awry. They do not react with incredulity and overwhelming horror, the way Leslie Davis, the American consul in Harput, did to the Turks’ slaughter of the Armenians taking place around him. He felt as though “the world were coming to an end.”6 Instead, to the perpetrators, as a Turkish reserve officer, commanding a unit of perpetrators, calmly explained, annihilating people by the tens of thousands or more makes perfect and good sense. Their purpose “was to destroy the Armenians and thereby to do away with the Ar­menian question.”7 The perpetrators see the imminent eliminationist onslaught as a rational means to solve severe problems, restore order to the world, straighten a badly twisted society. The record reveals virtu­ally no shock or befuddlement, let alone horror, among perpetrators upon learning of the eliminationist enterprise. Some incipient perpe­trators know that the gruesome task ahead may test their mettle. There are dissenters. But the evidence suggests they are very few compared to the legions of nondissenters readily giving themselves to violent and lethal programs.

In Rwanda, where the Hutu’s demonization of Tutsi was long, firmly established in the public discourse, and taken for granted in much of Hutu culture, and where in the years preceding the full-scale annihilationist assault there had been preparatory smaller-scaled mass murders of Tutsi, the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana together with Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6, 1994 (the culprits’ identities remain unknown) roiled the country. Vo­luminous testimony explicitly or implicitly conveys that Rwandans im­mediately understood that the assassination portended a potential bloodbath, and grasped its sources. Broadcasts on the two national radio stations, Radio Rwanda and RTLM, blamed the Tutsi for the assassination and, as in one broadcast that was recorded, explained that Tutsi should be attacked:

Because of bad [Tutsi] plans we had discovered. Because before the killing of the President of the Republic, people were talking about it in rumours, saying that he was going to die, and even [Hassan] Ngeze wrote about it in Kangura, and others said that after they [the Tutsi] have killed the President, they will exterminate the Hutu. When the Hutu saw that they had just killed the President of the Republic, they said, “Their project is being put into practice now.” They started be­fore them. So, the first reason is that they killed the President. The second one is that they attacked and the third because they were planning to exterminate the Hutu and I think there would be no Hutu left.8

This all made sense to Hutu who were ready to slaughter Tutsi. Hutu inside and outside of paramilitary, military, and police institutions al­most immediately were mobilized or mobilized themselves, requiring little or no explanation as to why the Tutsi would do the things that would make them necessary targets for annihilation. Hutu, led by local officials, held meetings in rural communities all over the country. A Hutu killer, Elie Ngarambe, recounts that “On [April] 10th that is when they started to call meetings of people. They were meeting in football fields, in primary schools, everywhere. So you can imagine all the people went to the meeting. They told them that things have changed, and that what was going to be killed were the Tutsi. They told them that the Tutsi are their only enemy. There was no one else that made the plane crash. There was no one else that killed the presi­dent of the republic except people who are called Inkotanyi. From this time on, fight against Inkotanyi. Fight against all their spies. Tutsi are their spies. Kill them all. That is how it is.” Having received the green light, Hutu in the military, paramilitary, police forces, and mostly in no formal organization at all, then sprang into action all over the country. Ngarambe explains that the authorities told them to “‘start patrols, stop the enemy, block all intersections to the point that wherever he would pass while fleeing, you will get him and kill him.’ So that is what happened after we came from the meeting. We went to a place where so many people pass and we got them. Some of them managed to escape and run, others were stopped by others because roadblocks were put in place almost everywhere. That is when the plan started to be put in ac­tion from the hour and a minute the authorities said so.” Ngarambe himself also killed people they stopped: “You would get him, put him down and hack him, after that you would hit him with a club, pull him and dump him somewhere and continue your journey.”9

7. Quoted in Vahakn Dadrian, “The Role of the Special Organisation in the Armenian Genocide during the First World War,” in Panikos Panayi, ed., Minorities in Wartime: National and Racial Groupings in Europe, North America and Australia during the Two World Wars (Oxford, UK: Berg, 1993), p. 57.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/how-they-are-implemented/42/feed/3Understanding Genocides: What We Can Dohttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/what-we-can-do/50/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/what-we-can-do/50/#commentsFri, 05 Mar 2010 23:33:24 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/?p=50The post Understanding Genocides: What We Can Do appeared first on Worse Than War.
]]>From the book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Excerpted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2009. For more information, please visit

Can there be any doubt that if the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda had been small countries nestled next to the United States, say immediately south of San Diego, then those countries’ leaders would not have embarked upon their eliminationist politics, let alone their ex­terminationist programs? Would Slobodan Milošević have tried to expel 1.5 million Kosovars into California, let alone slaughter eight thousand men (as he did in Srebrenica) in a city where Tijuana is today? Would he have set up concentration and rape camps and had roaming Serbian killing units within shouting distance of the American border, slaughtering men and raping women systematically in town after town? Would Théoneste Bagosora and the Hutu leadership have begun an at­tack to hack and club to death hundreds of thousands of people in full view of the American public and polity?

To ask these questions is to answer them: No. Milošević would not have dared. Bagosora and the Hutu leaders would not have dared. And had either done so, swift and massive American intervention would have ended the eliminationist assault, whatever its form. What does this thought experiment teach us? We can find out, if we ask why, prox­imate to San Diego, no political leaders, no matter the circumstances, would initiate mass expulsions and exterminations. What factors would make such a “solution” to any “problem” unfeasible, or unthinkable, even for political leaders wishing to adopt an eliminationist program and who, in other geographic settings and circumstances, would ea­gerly implement one? Slaughtering or expelling people by the hundreds of thousands in such a hypothetical North American country would be so unfeasible and unthinkable that we would not consider calling it prevention if a political leader, fearing intervention, would choose not to implement an eliminationist ideal. Because it would not be preven­tion in the narrow sense of taking action that forestalls an imminent assault, it is difficult for people to see that, in a broader sense, preven­tion is precisely what it would be.

The topic of prevention must be rethought. Doing so requires em­bedding its analysis in a discussion of several other themes that have emerged from this investigation. Just as eliminationist assaults are pred­icated upon a preparatory eliminationist discourse laying out the con­ceptions of problems and people putatively causing them, which provides the foundation for thinking that acting against those people is necessary and urgent, preventing such assaults requires an analogous, countervailing anti-eliminationist, or pro-human, discourse. This dis­course has several components: an accurate recognition of the problem of exterminationist and eliminationist assaults and politics; an accurate understanding of the domestic and international failures producing our catastrophic state of affairs; and an agreement that we must urgently act to stop current and prevent future exterminationist and elimina­tionist assaults (including smaller ones), to send eliminationist politics on the road to extinction. This anti-eliminationist discourse must be structured around eliminationist politics’ most fundamental facts: They have been a politics of impunity with the perpetrators’ subjective ben­efits far outweighing the costs. Hence the frequency.

Such an anti-eliminationist discourse prepares the way for redressing the catastrophic state of affairs. This also has several components. We must recognize that the possibility of effecting change in this large, dif­ficult area, though unacknowledged, is real, practical, and achievable. We must establish it as right to do. We must create the necessary re­solve to exercise our power for acting upon our duties. And we must devise the measures and policies that will effectively end eliminationist politics. In sum, we must reverse our time’s and human history’s pre­vailing equation by ensuring two things: Eliminationist politics will no longer be a politics of impunity, and when political leaders examine the social and political landscape they will know that initiating an exter­minationist or eliminationist onslaught will incur for them enormously more costs than benefits.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/what-we-can-do/50/feed/0Understanding Genocides: How Eliminationist Assaults Endhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/how-eliminationist-assaults-end/38/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/how-eliminationist-assaults-end/38/#commentsFri, 05 Mar 2010 21:23:47 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/?p=38The post Understanding Genocides: How Eliminationist Assaults End appeared first on Worse Than War.
]]>From the book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Excerpted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2009. For more information, please visit

The discussion of the international environment regarding elimina­tionist politics, and the essential immorality of those acting within it, provides the necessary context for investigating why individual mass murders and eliminations have ended, and why they did so when they did, and not earlier. Understanding political leaders’ failure to inter­vene to stop the world’s greatest horrors explains why eliminationist as­saults have ended: not because of world outrage, not because of mobilization against mass murder, but because of internal develop­ments among the perpetrators or external happenstance.

The Germans’ annihilation of the Herero proceeded apace without external pressure or serious internal condemnation, ending only when the Germans had killed enough, about 80 percent, to solve their “Herero problem.” It was then that German Chancellor von Bülow pressured the kaiser, for presumptive reputational reasons, to stop the wanton mass murder. The Germans had more or less finished the job and in any case, after the mass murder’s formal cessation, continued to assault the Herero with other brutal, though mainly nonlethal, elim­inationist means. The Belgians stopped their gargantuan annihilation of Congo’s people in 1908 on their own accord. The Turks’ annihilation of the Armenians similarly did not falter until they had depopulated Anatolia of Armenians and accomplished their eliminationist goal. With the Russian czar’s overthrow, the Turks seized the opportunity to restart their annihilationist assault in 1918 to slaughter Armenians who had fled Turkey to Transcaucasia, known as Russian Armenia, as well as Armenians already living there. The Indonesians stopped slaughter­ing communists because they decided the job was finished. The Pak­istanis ceased killing Bengalis only upon being militarily defeated by the Indians, who fought the Pakistanis for their own geostrategic rea­sons. Assad stopped slaughtering Hama’s people when the destruction was sufficiently horrific to deter other Syrians from challenging his dic­tatorship. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had to be defeated by the Viet­namese, who fought the war not as anti-eliminationists (they, after all, had their own gulag), but because the Khmer Rouge attacked Vietnam. And the many mass murderers of indigenous peoples around the world, all but ignored by the international community, have killed and ex­pelled these internationally invisible peoples and then stopped, accord­ing to their own rhythms and self-conceived needs.

Annihilationist and eliminationist regimes targeting several groups often end the various assaults in their own ways. The Soviets’ elimina­tionist policies went through different phases, which individually came to an end when Joseph Stalin deemed the job completed or when it seemed prudent to desist, such as during the war with Germany. After the war, Stalin resumed purges, although on a smaller scale, which ceased only with the regime’s change upon his death in 1953. The Com­munist Party continued to rule the Soviet Union. Yet its new leaders de­cided to break with Stalin’s eliminationist politics, so only days after he died, they began to end the regime’s terror and close down the gulag. Similarly, Saddam stopped the murderous assault upon the Kurds, the Marsh people, and the rebellious Shia when he was satisfied the job was well enough done. Yet his general murderousness ended only when the Americans and British deposed him for geostrategic reasons having nothing to do with his domestic slaughters and eliminations.

An accounting of the cessation of the Germans’ mass murdering of the Jews, and then of other targeted groups and peoples, differs by country and group. For the Jews, the Germans’ and their collaborators’ mass murdering in a country or region, such as in Lithuania, ended— except for the hunting down of those in hiding—when they succeeded in annihilating the country’s Jews or deporting them for extermination elsewhere. For other targeted groups, such as the Polish elite, whose members the Germans partly targeted in 1939 and 1940, the Germans stopped their concerted campaign upon achieving their temporary goal. But their general mass murdering ended in a country or region, and then completely, only with military rollback and then defeat by the Al­lies, who themselves were fighting not because of the Germans’ elimi­nationist assaults per se, but because they needed to destroy the regime waging an apocalyptic war of continental conquest. Had the Germans not been defeated, they might never have stopped, because their blue­print for the world, mandating the master race’s subjugation and ex­ploitation of all “lesser” races, would have required an unprecedented scale of destruction and ongoing use of all eliminationist means—re­pression, expulsion, transformation, prevention of reproduction, and extermination—to keep the “lesser” races dragooned and sufficiently diminished as to be controllable. The Germans’ allies in mass murder, in Vichy France and Yugoslavia, in Slovakia, stopped their elimina­tionist programs as the job was reaching completion or the Germans’ fortunes waned and occupation ended. The end of the Japanese mass murdering resembled the Germans’, with the crescendo having been Americans’ militarily unnecessary twin counterslaughters in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Our age’s other gargantuan mass-murder regime, in communist China, also had ebbs and flows in its eliminationist policies and targets, which Mao, ideologically driven, turned on and off according to the in­tersection of his political goals and his read of changing conditions. He stopped the colossally murderous Great Leap Forward, for example, al­most overnight in 1961. As with the Soviets, the general extermination­ist policies ended through internal regime change, finally stopped for good, at least on an epic scale, by Mao’s death in 1976. Yet the Chinese continue their imperialist eliminationist program in Tibet.

No matter where on the globe, or when in our time, one looks, the basic findings do not change. With few exceptions, eliminationist and exterminationist programs have ended because (1) the perpetrators reached their goals, (2) there was internal change owing to a leader’s death, the perpetrating regime took a new direction, or it was over­thrown, or (3) the states lost wars that were waged against them not to stop mass murders and eliminations but for other reasons. Outside in­tervention with the explicit intent to stop mass murder or eliminations— such as NATO’s late interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo and the United Nations’ insertion of peacekeepers in East Timor in 1999—has almost never happened. Even serious and effective sanctions expressly targeted to stop mass-murdering regimes from slaughtering more people have al­most never been imposed. And those regimes that stopped their mass killing for their own reasons, not because of military defeat, often con­tinue to assault the same groups and peoples, using other eliminationist means, including camps. As much as political leaders have learned they can slaughter with impunity, they know even better that lesser elimina­tionist measures, including expulsion, incarceration in camps, and the destruction of towns and homes, are in themselves that much less likely to produce a concerted international effort to thwart them.

Could these and other mass murders and eliminations have been stopped earlier? In so many instances the answer is obviously yes, or the international community or powerful countries could have at least made serious attempts offering a reasonable probability of success.

In Burundi, the Tutsi’s wanton butchery of Hutu, targeting the Hutu elite and middle class, lasted from May to July 1972. The personalized killing, face to face with machetes, was an inverted precursor to the Rwandan mass murder two and a half decades later. The world’s po­litical leaders knew of the Burundian killing, on a scale that at least re­sembled genocide, while it was under way. Only the Belgians, the region’s former colonials, made even token noises to stop the killing. The secretary general of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), then African countries’ major international political organization, visited Burundi’s capital during the height of the slaughter and formally de­clared: “The OAU, being essentially an organization based on solidar­ity, my presence here signifies the total solidarity of the Secretariat with the President of Burundi, with the government and the fraternal people of Burundi.” UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim was only slightly less craven in his public enabling of the mass murder. He conveyed his “fervent hopes that peace, harmony and stability can be brought about successfully and speedily, that Burundi will thereby achieve the goals of social progress, better standards of living and other ideals and prin­ciples set forth in the UN Charter.” This was the United Nations’ offi­cial response to a frenzy of killing that led the U.S. embassy’s chief of mission to cable the State Department: “No respite, no letup. What ap­parently is a genocide continues. Arrests going on around the clock.”10 Yet American President Richard Nixon did nothing. The U.S. Congress never discussed the matter. No economic pressure, which would have been virtually cost-free to the United States, was put on this desper­ately poor country. Intervention to save Africans’ lives in an all but mil­itarily defenseless country did not take place. The possibility seems never to have occurred to anyone. The four other instances of Tutsi perpetrating substantial slaughters of Hutu in Burundi elicited effec­tively no response from the international community.

Similarly, in Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, and elsewhere in Latin America where U.S. influence with their rightist governments was vast, the Americans had enormous power and could have halted the mass murders and eliminations at little cost. In some instances, it may have taken but a few words. But as we know, in some instances the United States actively or tacitly encouraged the slaughters. As Clinton has now conceded about the Guatemalan regime’s murder of 200,000 people in its eliminationist campaign, mainly aimed at Maya: “It is important that I state clearly that [American] support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report was wrong.” Indeed, it was not just “support” for such forces and it was not just “violent and widespread repression,” as bad as that would be. It was much worse. The United States set the contours of the national security policy that informed the Guatemalan (and other) regimes, and helped train the Guatemalan security forces in the counterinsurgency tactics they would use against Maya communi­ties. The violent repression included widespread mass slaughter and ex­pulsion. The Guatemalans’ exterminationist and eliminationist assault against the Maya came to an end when the Guatemalan leadership that deposed Ríos Montt decided the eliminationist task had been sufficiently completed as to render their self-conceived Mayan problem solved.

In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush’s American administration first encouraged southern Iraq’s Marsh peo­ple to rebel against Saddam and then forsook them. Although the Americans had just pulverized the now defenseless Saddam’s military capacity, he and his armed forces proceeded to wage a lethal elimina­tionist campaign against the Marsh people, systematically exterminat­ing them and laying waste to their villages and region, killing perhaps forty thousand, and driving hundreds of thousands from their homes forever. During the 1992 assault, British Member of Parliament Emma Nicholson reported:

Saddam has stepped up his onslaught in the marshes themselves. . . . I traveled through marshes smoking from ground-launched bom­bardments . . . reed-built villages have been razed, their small rice plots burned. . . . I reached the heart of the marshes, one mile from Saddam’s front line. There I found people starving, desperate peo­ple, drinking filthy water and eating contaminated fish. They had fled villages under assault by Saddam’s forces. . . . Many refugees like these have made the dash across the border into Iran. But to make the crossing, they must brave mined waters and a line of Sad-dam’s soldiers.11

Nicholson knew about it. The British government knew about it. The Americans knew about it. Everyone knew about it, including the coali­tion of more than thirty countries whose troops had just defeated the Iraqi army and ended Saddam’s imperial conquest of Kuwait. Yet they did nothing because geopolitical considerations—wanting to maintain Iraq as a countervailing force against Iran, not wanting to alienate the Americans’ Arab coalition allies by invading an Arab country—took precedence. If ever an instance existed for the absolute necessity of American intervention to stop mass murder and elimination, this was it: The Americans had encouraged the rebellion that catalyzed Saddam’s murderous eliminationist campaign; the mass murderer had just pro­voked a war with the United States, which soundly defeated him; and overpowering American military force was at hand. Nevertheless, Bush let the slaughter proceed unimpeded.

The eliminationist assaults in the former Yugoslavia by Serbs, first against Bosnians and Croats, then Kosovars, and by Croats against Serbs are more instances of how little political leaders are willing to do to stop mass murder, even at their doorstep. European nations, their political and media elites alike, often present themselves as paragons of moral conscience in contrast to the avaricious American colossus. Yet European governments individually and collectively stood by and watched systematic mass murder return, after less than a half century’s absence, to their continent. Some European voices urged intervention, but these were relatively weak and ineffectual. The major and minor countries’ political leaders and political classes did all they could to look the other way, explain away the problem as not being genocidal or as being intractable, fail to act forcefully, and drag their feet. In some instances, such as the Germans’ premature recognition of Slovenian in­dependence in violation of European Union policy, they actually helped precipitate the various stages of the crisis. All in all, the Europeans did nothing discernable to brake the killings and expulsions. Neither did the United States under Bush and during the Clinton administration’s first three years, even though the first Bush administration knew about the Serbs’ mass-murderous and eliminationist designs on Bosnia before the assault began, and immediately understood the assault for what it was once it did begin. Had Bush or Clinton decided to meet Slobodan Milosevic with a credible threat of the actual force Clinton eventually did effectively apply—just serious bombing—the Serbs would not have slaughtered tens of thousands of Muslims, brutally expelled hundreds of thousands, or raped enormous numbers of women, and a more just cultural and political settlement would have emerged from Yugoslavia’s breakup. Only when Clinton, much too late, used American airpower in Kosovo in what was formally, as it had also been in Bosnia, a NATO intervention was MiloševiN’s eliminationist rampage in the West Euro­peans’ backyard finally halted.

The story in Rwanda is even more sordid. The French, serving as the Francophone Hutu’s guardians, and UN leaders possessed explicit ad­vance knowledge that the Hutu leadership intended to embark upon a colossal mass murder of the Tutsi. The French had even armed and trained the eventual murderers. Did French President François Mitter­rand or the head of the UN peacekeeping force, Kofi Annan (later re­warded with a promotion to UN secretary-general!), warn the Tutsi or the world? No. Did they tell the Hutu political leadership that the in­ternational community would intervene to stop them and would treat them as criminals if they proceeded with the mass murder? No. Did they seek to mobilize troops to intervene, or even just to make a cred­ible threat that might give the regime pause? No. What did they do? First, when General Romeo Dallaire, the military commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, informed Annan of the Hutu’s plan to exterminate Tutsi leaders and Belgian peacekeepers to get the United Nations to withdraw its peacekeepers, Annan forbade Dallaire from intervening to protect the Tutsi, an order Annan never rescinded. Annan and Mitterrand kept quiet about the plans, providing cover for the mass murderers. Once the killing began, the United Nations with­drew its troops, abandoning the Tutsi and giving the Hutu the green light to slaughter them. The French did eventually send soldiers, which they have had no compunction to do in Africa to serve their interests, though here it was not to stop but effectively facilitate the butchery by protecting the Hutu regime. The rest of the world mobilized very late in the killing process to send some troops, in order to create a few safe havens but not to stop the mass murdering more generally—although halting the poorly armed and -trained perpetrators would have been easy. The killing continued until a Tutsi army, invading Rwanda from Uganda, defeated the Hutu militarily.

The French political leaders were at the helm of a democratic coun­try that, like other democracies, is generally supportive of human rights. Why then did they collaborate in a mass murder that was of an intensity (number killed per month) that exceeded the Germans’ slaugh­ter of European Jews? Because the Hutu are Francophones and the Tutsi from Uganda who threatened the Hutu’s tyrannical rule are not. The French, engaged in a virtually magical realist struggle to maintain their waning cultural importance around the world, decided that their self-image trumped the lives of 800,000 men, women, and children. Why did Annan permit the mass annihilation to proceed unimpeded? Anyone might assume that someone authorizing such intervention and going against the international community’s status quo hands-off policies would make a mortal enemy of France, a UN Security Council perma­nent member with veto power over who becomes secretary-general.

In Rwanda, the world failed to work to stop the colossal slaugh­ter taking place in full view, which it easily could have done at any of several stages, including before its inception. Some of its leading members also made the bloodbath possible, or at least far more likely and more deadly.

The far more formidable Taliban ruling Afghanistan, home to the genocidal bin Laden and Al Qaeda, was toppled easily by a mainly American campaign aided by an international expeditionary force. It took the American and allied forces only two weeks after inserting troops (following bombing) to rout the regime. (Subsequent strategic and tactical blunders have allowed a powerful insurgency to grow.) Un­usual for a Western power, the United States was highly motivated to act against this mass-murdering regime for the obvious reason that it was the haven and staging ground for Al Qaeda, which had destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11, damaged the Pen­tagon, killed three thousand people, and stunned and mobilized the American people. Would the motivation have been there had the Tal­iban or bin Laden slaughtered three thousand Afghanis? Or ten thou­sand? Or even 100,000? Of course not. Each of the many other instances of large domestic killing repeatedly answers this question for the United States and the powerful countries in the negative. Dislodg­ing the Hutu genocidal regime in geographically small Rwanda, one of the world’s poorest countries, would have been easy and not very costly. But 800,000 Tutsi’s lives are evidently less valuable than 3,000 American lives.

These instances show how little the world, the United Nations, the major powers, the political decision-makers have done even when it would have been relatively easy to stop mass murder. The world’s political heavyweights do not act to save innocent lives, because the nation-state is egoistic and its leaders are self-interested, and because the lives of people who are deemed to be unlike those living in the pow­erful countries are devalued. As Dallaire in 2004 said about the Hutu’s slaughter of the Tutsi, “I still believe that if an organization decided to wipe out the 320 mountain gorillas there would be still more of a re­action by the international community to curtail or to stop that than there would be still today in attempting to protect thousands of human beings being slaughtered in the same country.”12

Once the mechanisms that have stopped mass murder and elimina­tions are known, the question as to why eliminations do not end earlier than they do mainly answers itself. In almost all of our time’s mass slaughters and eliminations, the leaders of the powerful international institutions and states, the effective agents capable of stopping a dedi­cated eliminationist regime, have not acted at all. So, obviously, they were never going to intervene early, to stop, let alone prevent, the ca­tastrophes, while tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved.

Intervention can take place. The horrible record of countries and their leaders need not be reproduced forever. To bring about effective change, we need to consider how we can transform the international environment regarding eliminationist politics, including the incentive structure that potential mass murderers and eliminationists confront, and how to promote right and necessary action among the world’s powerful political actors.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/how-eliminationist-assaults-end/38/feed/2Understanding Genocides: Why The Onslaughts Endhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/why-the-onslaughts-end/37/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/stories-essays/understanding-genocides/why-the-onslaughts-end/37/#commentsFri, 05 Mar 2010 21:13:40 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/worse-than-war/?p=37The post Understanding Genocides: Why The Onslaughts End appeared first on Worse Than War.
]]>From the book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Excerpted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2009. For more information, please visit

All eliminationist onslaughts end sooner or later, but not for the same reason. Why they end is an important question. Why they do not end earlier is perhaps an even more important question. Answering these questions requires us to broaden our view, to examine not only the perpetrators and their states and societies, but also their re­lations with other peoples and states

The effects of mass murder and elimination are well known. The perpetrators are roundly condemned and repudiated abroad, except by self-interested apologists. Less well known, discussed, and analyzed are the broader contexts in which mass murders transpire, which include the reactions of neighboring countries and the world. This is not be­cause the topic is insignificant. The international environment critically influences political leaders’ decision-making about people’s fundamen­tal rights within their own countries and abroad, and how, as a practi­cal matter, they must govern and treat different people and groups. Witness the prominent and often dominant emphasis on human rights in international relations. During the past two decades, various coun­tries, regional entities such as the European Union, and transnational and international institutions have encouraged countries to move to­ward democratic politics and free markets, positively influencing many countries’ societies and politics.

We must reinsert our thinking about eliminationist and extermina­tionist politics into an understanding of international politics. Elimina­tionist politics is part of a world system of countries that, by acting or not acting, affect one another economically, politically, socially, and culturally, and over life and death. The formal position and claim that countries do not intervene in other countries’ affairs has governed the international state system for generations and is enshrined as binding international law in the UN Charter. Nevertheless, (1) countries’ polit­ical intervention, singly and in concert, into other countries’ affairs has actually been normal, and (2) countries, by varied means, regularly sig­nal other countries about possible interventions.

States have always tried to influence the character of other states, societies, and peoples. Conquest and colonization have been staples of human civilization, including during our age. Countries successfully re­pulsing aggressors have continued beyond their own borders until the attacking countries sue for peace, often relinquishing territory, or are conquered, the offending regimes replaced, or critical features of state or society are altered. A central goal of international institutions and al­liances and of individual countries’ foreign policies has been to support and create abroad favorable political regimes and economic systems, and to undermine or prevent unfavorable regimes. During the cold war, much of the world was divided into two camps led by the two super­powers, with each side seeking to sustain its members’ political and economic systems, undermine those of the opposing camp, and influ­ence nonaligned countries’ domestic politics and economics to make them friendlier. Today many countries interfere in other countries’ do­mestic politics by promoting democracy and free markets, among many more specific features of state and society. Such attempts employ the full range of political means available, from implementing military in­tervention or its threat; to imposing economic sanctions or their threat; to setting down political, economic, and social conditions and human rights standards countries must meet in order to make treaties, join in­ternational federations, participate in international organizations and commercial relations; to diplomatic initiatives; to public praise or de­nunciation. Regardless of whether such acts accord with international law and treaties, states have always tried to shape other countries’ do­mestic politics and practices, and they have often succeeded.

The notion that states must not intervene in other countries’ domes­tic affairs and that sovereignty is inviolable is, in practice, ignored all the time. Intervention today is typically done in the name of freedom and other higher, universal values, and the rule of law, though this is often cynical cover for motives of political or economic power or ad­vantage. Either way, intervention has been and is a common practice, and noble principles are put forward and often accepted as legitimizing justifications.

States have been able to influence other countries’ leaders who con­template and then begin to carry out eliminationist assaults. Yet, in con­trast to all the other ways that states have claimed to be legitimately influencing the domestic practices of other states, societies, and peoples, political leaders have rarely defended the innocent abroad by seriously trying to forestall or stop mass murder, let alone mass elimination.